Introduction

What finally decided me to write about my life was a letter I had in 1941 from a friend in Scotland who said that he felt that I would really render a service if I could show people how I became what I am from what I was. It might be useful to know how a rabid, orthodox Christian worker could become a well-known occult teacher. People might learn much by discovering how a theologically minded Bible student could come to the firm conviction that the teachings of the East and of the West must be fused and blended before the true and universal religion - for which the world waits - could appear on earth. There is value in knowing that the love of God antedates Christianity and recognizes no boundaries. This was the first and most difficult lesson I had to learn and it took me a long time. It takes all fundamentalists much time to learn that God is love. They assert it but do not believe it in practice, God's practice I mean.

I would like, among other things, to show how the world of human beings opened up to a very class-conscious English woman and how the world of spiritual values with its direct, inner, spiritual government became a proven fact to an exceedingly narrow-minded Christian. I glory in the name of Christian but I now belong to the inclusive kind and not the exclusive.

One of the things that I seek to bring out in this story is the fact of this inner direction of world affairs and to familiarize more people with the paralleling fact of the existence of Those Who are responsible (behind the scenes) for the spiritual guidance of humanity, and for the task of leading mankind out of darkness into Light, from the unreal to the Real and from death to Immortality. [2]

I want to make the Disciples of the Christ who are the Masters of the Wisdom, real to people, as real as They are to me and many thousands in the world. I do not mean a hypothetical reality (if we may use such a phrase) or as a subject of faith and belief. I want to show Them as They are - Disciples of the Christ, living men, and ever present factors in human affairs. Those are the things which are of moment and not the earthly experiences, the happenings and events in the life of one of Their workers.

I have lived many incarnations in one. I have moved forward steadily but with exceeding difficulty (psychological and material) into an ever widening field of usefulness. I want to show that in each cycle of experience, I did sincerely try to follow a leading, coming from within, and that when I did, it always meant a step forward in understanding and a greater ability, therefore, to help. The result of this apparently blind moving forward (as when I married and came to the U.S.A.) was extended opportunity. I have played many parts in my life. I was an unhappy, exceedingly disagreeable, little girl, a society girl in the gay nineties (which I didn't find so gay) and then an evangelist of the "Billy Sunday" type and a social worker. Again - not so gay, except that I was young and tremendously interested in everything. Later, I married Walter Evans and found myself functioning as the wife of a rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church in California and the mother of three girls.

This varied experience of living and working in Great Britain, Europe, Asia and America led to basic changes in my attitudes to life and people. To remain static in a point of view strikes me as unintelligent. It means that there comes a point in one's development when one ceases to learn, when one fails to extract the meaning out of events, schools of thought and circumstance, and when one remains [3] mentally quiescent in the face of life. That is disaster. That is evil. That, surely, is what hell must mean. The awfulness of hell (in which I do not believe from the orthodox point of view) must lie in "everlasting" sameness, in a forced inability to change conditions.

I became next an occult student, a writer of books which have had a wide and constant circulation and which have been translated into many languages. I found myself the head of an esoteric school - all unwittingly and without any planned intention - and the organizer, with Foster Bailey, of an International Goodwill Movement (not a peace movement) which proved so successful that we had centers in nineteen countries when the war broke out in 1939.

I have not, therefore, been useless where world service is concerned but I do not, and cannot, claim that my success has been due to my personal efforts alone. I have always been blessed with marvelous friends and helpers who - down the years - have remained my friends, no matter what I did to them. I have had many such friends and a few - a very surprisingly few - enemies. These latter have done me no real harm, perhaps because I could never dislike them and could always understand why they disliked me. My husband, Foster Bailey, has for over twenty-five years made all my work possible. Without him I feel I could have accomplished very little. Where there is deep and abiding love and understanding, respect and unbroken comradeship, one is rich indeed. He has been to me a tower of strength and "the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land." There are things which are damaged by expression in words and which sound meaningless and futile when written down. Our relationship is one of them. For many lives we must have lived and worked together and we both look forward to many more. I have no more to say on this subject. What, I often ask myself. could I have done without the understanding [4] friendship, affection and staunch cooperation of my many friends and co-workers who for years have stood by me? I cannot list them but they are the people who are essentially responsible for the success of the work we - as a group - have done.

The reason for this autobiography is therefore a threefold one, for there are three things upon which I want to lay the emphasis, and which I hope will emerge into clarity.

First of all, the fact of the Masters of the Wisdom, Who work under the guidance of the Christ. I want to make clearer the nature of Their work. I want to present Them to the world as I personally know Them, because, in the years that are coming, more and more people will testify to Their existence, and I would like to make the way easier for them. This I will enlarge upon later and show how I personally came to know of Their existence. In everyone's life there are certain convincing factors which make living possible. Nothing can alter one's inner conviction. To me, the Masters are such a factor and this knowledge has formed a stabilizing point in my life.

The second thing which I would like to do is to indicate some of the new trends in the world today which are definitely influencing mankind and raising the human consciousness. I want to point to some of the newer ideas which are coming out into the world of human thought from the inner group of Masters and which are ushering in a new civilization and culture and - incidentally from the angle of eternity - destroying many old and beloved forms. In my life I have seen, as have all thinking people, the disappearance of much that was worthless in the field of religion, of education and of the social order. And that is very good.

Looking back, I can imagine nothing more appalling than the perpetuation of the Victorian era, for instance, with its ugliness, its smugness, and the excessive comfort of [5] the upper classes (so-called) and the frightful condition under which the laboring classes struggled. It was in that well-padded, sleek and comfortable world I lived when a girl. I can imagine nothing more blighting to the human spirit than the theology of the past with the emphasis upon a God who saves a smug few and condemns the majority to perdition. I can imagine nothing more conducive to unrest, class war, hate and degradation than the economic situation of the world, then and for many decades - a situation largely responsible for the present world war (1914-1945).

Thank God, we are on our way to better things. The group who have shared our work - along with many other groups, responding to the same inspiration of love of humanity - will have done our tiny part in bringing about much needed changes. The world trend towards federation, towards understanding and cooperation, and towards those things which will benefit all and not just a chosen few is of encouraging importance. We are on our way towards brotherhood.

The third thing which I would like to do is to show how wonderful human beings are. I have lived on three continents and in many nations. I have known the very rich and the very poor, intimately and from the angle of close friendship; the very highest in the world have been my friends and the very lowest; and in all classes, nations and races I have found the same humanity, the same beauty of thought, the same self-sacrifice and the same love of others, the same sins and weaknesses, the same pride and selfishness, the same aspiration and spiritual objectives and the same desire to serve. If I can manage to bring this out with clarity and force, that alone will justify this book.

In the long range of human history and placed along with the world's great Figures, who is Alice Ann Bailey? [6] A quite unimportant woman who was forced (usually against her will) by circumstances, by an actively intruding conscience, and by a knowledge of what her Master wanted done, to undertake certain tasks. A woman who was always scared of life (perhaps partly due to an over-sheltered childhood) ; who is naturally so shy that even today, if she has to go to a luncheon party, has to muster the courage to ring the bell; who is very domestic and loves to cook and wash (and God knows has done her full share of it) and who hates publicity. I have never been robust but have enormous vitality. All through my life I have been forced to spend weeks and sometimes months in bed. For the last eight years I have been kept alive by medical science, but - and this is one thing about which I could say I am proud - I have kept going on, in spite of it all. I have found life very, very good even when having what most people regarded as the worst possible time. There has always been so much to do, so many people to know. I have only one basic grumble and that is that I have always been so tired. In an old churchyard in England there is a tombstone which has on it words which I can fully understand.

Here lies a poor woman who always were tired.
She lived in a world where too much were required.
Weep not for me, friends; the land where I am going
There'll be no more dusting or sweeping or sewing.
Weep not for me, friends, though death us may sever.
I am going to do nothing for ever and ever.

Now that really would be hell and I don't want to go there. I want to take a new and more adequate body and come back to gather up the old threads, find the same group of workers and go on with the job. If the story of my life encourages another ordinary person to push forward, this book will be worth while; if it leads some person with aspiration [7] to launch out in obedience to spiritual impulse, something will have been gained and if I can give strength and courage and a sense of reality to other workers and disciples that will be good.

You can see, therefore, that as a life story mine does not matter much. As a means, however, of proving certain facts which I know to be essential to the future happiness and progress of humanity - the fact of the Masters, the unfolding future for which the world war (just ended) is but a preparatory stage, and the possibility of telepathic and direct spiritual contacts and knowledge - what I say may prove to be of service. Many isolated mystics, disciples and aspiring men and women down the ages have known all these things. The time has now come when the masses of men everywhere must know them too.

So here goes for the story of my life. Do not be misled. It is not going to be a deeply religious effusion. I am a flippant and humorous person and almost painfully ready to see the funny side of things. Between you and me, people's profound interest in themselves and in their souls and all the intricacies of related experiences almost staggers me. I want to shake them and say, "Come outside and find your soul in other people and so discover your own." What is going on in people's minds and hearts and what is happening in the world of men is the fundamental interest. The broad sweeps of human progress from the primeval age to the dawn of the impending new civilization is of interest and all of spiritual import. The self-disclosures of the mystic of medieval times have their place but it lies in the past; the achievements of modern science (though not man's use of these revelations) are a major modern spiritual factor; the struggle that is going on between political ideologies, between capital and labor and the breakdown of our past educational systems are all indicative of a divine and spiritual [8] ferment which is leavening humanity. And yet the mystic way of introspection and of divine union must precede the occult way of intellectual realization and divine perception. It always has in the life of the individual and of humanity as a whole. The mystic and the occult way, the way of the heart and the head, must fuse and blend and then humanity will know God and not just "feel after Him if haply they may find Him."

This personal knowledge of God will, however, come by living normally and as beautifully as possible, by serving and by being interested in others and thus being decentralized. It will come by recognizing the good life and the good in all peoples, by happiness and an intelligent appreciation of opportunity - one's own as well as other people's. It comes through full and complete living. In the English graveyard where my parents are buried there was a tombstone (the first that caught one's eye on going through the gates) and on it the words, "She hath done what she could." To me it always seemed so doleful - the epitaph of a failure. I regret I have not done all I could, but I always did my best as I saw it at the time. I worked. I made mistakes. I agonized and I rejoiced. I had a grand time living and I am not going to have a bad time dying! [9]

Chapter I

Looking back over my early childhood, I experience a feeling of great dislike of it all. That is of course a bad note upon which to begin the story of one's life. It is what metaphysicians call a negative statement. But the statement is true. I do not like much that I remember about my childhood though many of my possible readers might think it all quite wonderful in comparison with the early years of countless thousands. Many people say that childhood is the happiest time of a person's life. I do not for one minute believe it. They were for me the years of greatest physical comfort and of luxury; they were years of freedom from all material anxiety but they were, at the same time, years of miserable questioning, of disillusionment, of unhappy discovery and of loneliness.

Yet as I write this, I am conscious of the fact that the miseries of childhood (and perhaps this is true of all life as a whole,) loom unduly large and appear more terrific than they were in reality. There is a curious trait in human nature which loves to record and emphasize the unhappy moments and the tragedies but overlooks the moments of gaiety and joy and of uneventual peace and happiness. Our hours of stress and strain appear to affect our consciousness (that curious recording agent of all events) far more than do the untold hours of ordinary living. If we could but realize it, those placid, uneventful hours always, in the last analysis, predominate. They are the hours, days, weeks and months in which character forms, stabilizes and becomes available for use in the crises - real, objective, and often momentous - with which we are at intervals down the years confronted. Then what we developed as character either stands the test [10] and indicates a way out, or fails and we go down, temporarily at least. It is in this fashion that we are forced to go on learning. As I look back over my childhood, it is not the countless hours of uneventful happiness, the moments of peaceful rhythm and the weeks in which nothing disturbing ever occurred which persist in my memory, but moments of crisis and the hours when I was utterly miserable and the times when life seemed ended and nothing worthwhile lay ahead.

I can recollect my eldest daughter reaching such a moment when she was in her early twenties. She felt that there was nothing to live for, and that life was a monotonous waste. Why was life so stupid? Why did she have to take it? Not knowing what to say, I fell back on my own experience and remember so well saying to her, "Well, darling, one thing I can tell you. You never know what lies just around the corner." I never found that religion, or common sense platitudes - as usually dished out - help in a time of crisis. What lay for her around the corner was the man she married, to whom she became engaged within a week and with whom she has been happy ever since.

One needs to cultivate the awareness of the things of joy and happiness and not only register the things of sorrow and difficulty. The good, as well as the bad, are a total which matters and which warrants remembrance. The first enables us to retain our belief in the love of God. The second brings discipline and feeds our aspiration. The rapturous moments when a sunset arrests our amazed attention, or the silence, deep and unbroken, of the moors and country envelop one's spirit - those are points of remembrance; a skyline or a riot of color in a garden engrossing us to the exclusion of all else; friend calling to friend and a resulting hour of communion and of satisfying contact; some beauty of the human soul emerging triumphant in the face of [11] difficulty - these are the things which must not pass unrecognized. They constitute the great conditioning factors of life. They indicate the divine. Why is it that they are so often forgotten and the disagreeable, sad or terrible things remain fixtures in one's mind? I do not know. Apparently on this peculiar planet of ours, suffering is registered more acutely than happiness and seems more enduring in effect. Perhaps, also, we are afraid of happiness and push it away from us under the influence of man's great outstanding characteristic - Fear.

In esoteric circles, there is much learned talk about the Law of Karma which is, after all, only the Eastern name for the great Law of Cause and Effect; the emphasis is ever upon evil karma and how to avoid it. Yet I would guarantee that, taking it by and large, there is far more general good karma than evil; I say this in spite of the world war, the unutterable horror by which we have been and are still surrounded and in spite of a real knowledge of the things with which all social workers constantly have to deal. The evil and the misery will pass but happiness will remain; above everything else will come the realization that what we have so badly built must disappear and that ours is now the opportunity to build a new and better world. This is true because God is good, life and experience are good, and the will-to-good is eternally present. Always we are proffered the opportunity to right the wrongs which we have wrought and to put straight the crooked places for which we are responsible.

The details of my unhappiness are so remote that I cannot be specific and I do not intend to inflict upon you what I do remember. Many of the causes lay within myself, of that I am sure. From the worldly angle, I had no reason to be miserable and my family and friends would have been greatly surprised had they known my reactions. Have you [12] not many times in life wondered what goes on in the mind of a child? Children do have definite ideas on life and circumstances, and they do belong to themselves in a way with which no one can interfere but which is seldom recognized. I cannot remember the time when I was not thinking, and puzzling and asking questions and rebelling and hoping. Yet I was 35 years old before I really discovered that I had a mind and that it was something which I could use. Up to that time, I had been a bundle of emotions and feelings; my mind - what there was of it - had used me and not been used by me. At any rate, I was thoroughly unhappy until I broke away to live my own life around the age of 22. During those early years I was surrounded by beauty; my life was full of variety and I met many interesting people. I never knew what it was to want anything. I was brought up in the usual luxury of my day and class; I was watched over with the greatest care - but within myself I hated it all.

I was born on June 16th, 1880, in the city of Manchester, England, where my father was engaged on an engineering project connected with his father's firm - one of the most important in Great Britain. I was, therefore, born under the sign of Gemini. This always means a conflict between the opposites - poverty and riches, the heights of happiness and the depths of sorrow, the pull between the soul and personality or between the higher self and the lower nature. The United States and London are ruled by Gemini and therefore it is in that country and Great Britain that the great conflict between capital and labor will be solved; two groups which involve the interests of the very rich and the very poor.

Until 1908 I wanted for nothing; I never thought about money; I did and went as I chose. But from that time on I knew the depths of poverty. I lived once for three weeks on tea (without milk or sugar) and dry bread so that my three [13] children could have what was essential to eat. As a girl, I visited for weeks at a time in many great houses; yet I have worked as a factory hand to support the children. It was a sardine cannery and I still do not care to look a sardine in the eye. My friends (and I use the word in its true sense) have ranged all the way from the very lowest type of person on through all classes to include such people as the Grand Duke Alexander, the brother-in-law of the late Czar of Russia. I have never lived for any length of time in one place, for the Gemini person is always on the move. My small grandson (who is also a true Gemini) crossed the Atlantic twice and was through the Panama Canal on two occasions before he was four years old. From another angle, if I did not watch myself with the greatest care, I would always be either in the heights of happiness and exhilaration or overcome with despair and in the depths of depression. As the result of much experience I have learnt to repudiate both extremes and endeavor to live on a tableland. I have not altogether succeeded.

My major life conflict has been the battle between my soul and my personality and that still goes on. As I write this I am reminded of a meeting of a certain "Group Movement" to which I was inveigled in 1935 at Geneva, Switzerland. A smug, hard-faced, smiling "professional" Grouper was present as leader and there were a lot of people eager to testify to their wickedness and to the saving power of Christ, giving the impression that God was personally interested as to whether (as one of them testified) she apologized to her cook for rudeness. To me, good manners and not God should have been sufficient incentive. Anyway, a charming woman got up - elderly, smart and twinkling with humor. "I am sure you have a wonderful testimony to make," said the leader. "No," replied the lady, "no, the battle is still on between Christ and me and it's quite debatable who [14] will come out on top." That battle is always on and, in the case of a Gemini who is awake and serving, it becomes a very vital matter and also a rather private one.

Gemini people are also supposed to be chameleon-like in nature and changeable in quality and often double-faced. I am none of these, at least, in spite of many faults and it is possible that my rising sign saves me. Leading astrologers, to my amusement, assign different signs as my rising sign - Virgo, because I love children and cooking, and "mothering" an organization; Leo, because I am very individual (by which they mean difficult and dominant) and also very self-conscious; and Pisces, because that sign is the sign of the mediator or the intermediary. I am inclined myself to Pisces, because I have a Pisces husband, because my very dear eldest daughter was also born in that sign and we always understood each other so well that we frequently used to quarrel. Also, I have definitely acted as an intermediary in the sense that certain teaching which the Hierarchy of Masters wanted to get out to the world during this century is contained in the books for which I have been responsible. Anyway, no matter what my rising sign, I am a true Gemini subject and that sign has apparently conditioned my life and circumstances.

My childhood general and rather inchoate unhappiness was founded on several things. I was the plainest of an exceedingly good looking family and I am not plain. I was always regarded as rather stupid when in the schoolroom and as the least intelligent of an intelligent family.

My sister was one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen and her brains are superlative. I have always been devoted to her though she has no use for me, being a most orthodox Christian and regarding anyone who has had the misfortune to get a divorce as quite without the pale. She is a doctor and was one of the first women in the long, long [15] history of Edinburgh University to win distinction and - if I remember correctly - she did this twice. She was quite young when she published three books of poetry and I have read reviews of these books in The London Times Literary Supplement, hailing her as England's greatest living poetess. A book she wrote on Biology and another on Tropical Diseases were, I believe, regarded as standard text books.

She married my first cousin, Laurence Parsons, who is a prominent ecclesiastic of the Church of England and was at one time Dean of Cape Colony. His mother was the guardian, appointed by the Courts of Chancery, to take care of my sister and myself. She was my father's youngest sister, and Laurence was one of her six boys with whom we spent much time as children. Her husband, my Uncle Clare, a somewhat hard and stern man, was the brother of Lord Rosse and son of the Lord Rosse of telescope fame, mentioned in The Secret Doctrine. As a child I was terrified of him, yet before he died, he showed me another side of his nature and one which is not well known. His exceeding kindness to me during the first world war when I was stranded in great poverty in America, I shall never forget. He wrote me helpful and understanding letters and made me feel that there were those in Great Britain who had not forgotten me. I want to mention this here, because I do not believe that his family or his daughter-in-law, my sister, had the faintest idea of the friendly and happy relationship which existed between me and my uncle towards the end of his life. He never spoke of it, I am sure, and I have not done so until now.

My sister later took up cancer research and has made herself a brilliant name in the field of this most needed work. I am very proud of her. I have never altered in my affection for her and should she ever read this autobiography, I want her to know this. Fortunately, I believe in [16] the great Law of Rebirth and she and I will some day work out, more satisfactorily, our definite relationship.

I suppose one of the greatest drawbacks in the life of any child is having no real home. The lack of it most certainly conditioned my sister and me. Both my parents died before I was nine years old and both died of tuberculosis (consumption, as it was called in those days). The fear of tuberculosis lay like an imminent threat over both of us in our early years and also our father's resentment over our existence, particularly, for some reason, over mine. He probably felt my mother would be alive if having two children had not drained her physical resources.

My father was Frederic Foster La Trobe-Bateman and my mother was Alice Hollinshead. Both were of very old stock - my father's family dating back for centuries, even antedating the Crusades, and my mother's forebears being descended from Hollinshead, "the Chronicler," from whom it is claimed that Shakespeare got so many of his stories. Family trees and pedigrees have never seemed to me to be of very real importance. Everybody has them; only some families have kept records. As far as I know none of my ancestors did anything particularly interesting. They were worthy but apparently dull. As my sister once put it, "they sat among their cabbages for centuries." It was good, clean and cultured stock but none of the people attained any famous or infamous notoriety.

The family crest is, however, a very interesting one and, from the angle of esoteric symbolism, extraordinarily significant. I know nothing of heraldry or the correct terms in which to describe it. It consists of a rod with a wing at each end and between the wings are to be seen the five-pointed star and the crescent moon. The latter harks back, of course, to the Crusades in which some of my forebears must have apparently participated but I like to think of the whole [17] symbol as typifying the wings of aspiration, the Rod of Initiation and as portraying the goal and the means, the objective of evolution and the incentive which drives us all on towards perfection - a perfection which eventually receives the accolade of recognition by means of the Rod. In the language of symbolism the five-pointed star has always signified perfected man and the crescent moon is supposed to rule the lower or form nature. This is the A.B.C. of occult symbolism but it interests me to find it all brought together in our family crest.

My grandfather was John Frederic La Trobe-Bateman. He was a very well known engineer, consultant to the British Government and responsible in his day for several of the municipal water systems of Great Britain. He had a large family. His eldest daughter, my aunt Dora, married Brian Barttelot, brother of Sir Walter Barttelot of Stopham Park, Pulborough, Sussex, and as she was appointed our guardian on the death of our grandparents we saw much of her and her four children. Two of these cousins remained my close friends all through my life. They were both considerably older than I but we liked and understood each other. Brian (Admiral Sir Brian Barttelot) only passed over two years ago and it has meant a real loss to me and my husband, Foster Bailey. We were three close friends and his constant letters are greatly missed by us.

Another aunt, Margaret Maxwell, has perhaps meant more to me than any other relative in the world, and I have many. She was never my guardian but my sister and I spent every summer with her in her Scotch home for years and, until she died (well over 80 years old) she wrote to me regularly at least once a month. She was one of the great beauties of her period and the portrait of her which hangs today in Cardoness Castle, Kirkcudbrightshire, is of one of the loveliest women one can imagine. She married the "Younger [18] of Cardoness" (as the heir is sometimes called in Scotland), the eldest son of Sir William Maxwell, but her husband, my Uncle David, died before his father and, therefore, never inherited the title. To her I owe more than I can ever repay. She oriented me spiritually and though her theology was very narrow, yet she herself was very broad. She gave me certain keynotes for spiritual living which have never failed me and to the end, she herself never failed me. When I became interested in esoteric matters and gave up being an orthodox, theologically minded Christian, she wrote me that she could not understand but she certainly could trust me because she knew that I had a deep love for Christ and that no matter what doctrine I might renounce she knew I would never renounce Him. That was the exact truth. She was beautiful, lovely and good. Her influence was widespread throughout the British Isles. She had her own specially built and endowed cottage hospital; she supported missionaries in heathen countries and was president of the Y. W. C. A. in Scotland. If I have been of any service to my fellowmen and if I have done anything to bring people into some measure of spiritual realization, it is largely because she loved me enough to start me right.

She was one of the few people who cared fore more than they cared for my sister. There was a link between us which remains unbroken and will forever remain unbroken.

I have already mentioned my father's youngest sister, Agnes Parsons. There were two others; Gertrude, who married a Mr. Gurney Leatham, and my father's youngest brother, Lee La Trobe-Bateman, who is the only one now remaining alive. My grandmother was Anne Fairbairn, daughter of Sir William Fairbairn and niece of Sir Peter Fairbairn. My great-grandfather, Sir William, was, I believe, a partner of Watts (of steam engine fame) and one of the first railroad builders in the Victorian era. Through [19] my grandfather's mother (whose maiden name was La Trobe), I come from French Huguenot stock and the La Trobes of Baltimore are, therefore, related to me, though I have never looked them up. Charles La Trobe, my great-great-uncle, was among the first governors of Australia and another La Trobe was the first governor of Maryland. Edward La Trobe, still another brother, was an architect and was well known in Washington and Great Britain.

The Fairbairns did not belong to the so-called aristocracy of birth which is so much prized. Perhaps this was the salvation of the Bateman - Hollinshead - La Trobe stock. They belonged to the aristocracy of brains and that is of greater importance in these democratic days. Both William and Peter Fairbairn started life as the sons of a poor Scotch farmer in the 18th century. Both ended up as rich men and both gained titles. You will find Sir William Fairbairn's name in Webster's Dictionary and Sir Peter's memory is perpetuated in a statue in a square in Leeds, England. I remember a few years ago arriving in Leeds to lecture. As the taxi drove through a square there I noticed what I thought was a statue of a plain old man with a beard. The next day my husband went to look at it and I discovered I had been criticizing my great-uncle! Great Britain was democratic even in those far off days and people had their chance to rise if they had that in them which warranted it. Perhaps the admixture of plebeian blood is responsible for the fact that my cousins and their children have been, many of them, notable men or good looking women.

My father did not care for me and when I see the picture of myself when small, I can scarcely wonder - skinny, scared and startled looking. I have no recollection of my mother for she died at the age of 29, when I was only six years old. I do remember her beautiful golden hair and her gentleness, but that is all. I also remember her funeral at [20] Torquay, Devonshire, because my major reaction to that event was summed up in my words to my cousin, Mary Barttelot, "See, long black stockings and 'spenders'" - the first I had ever had. I had been promoted from the sock stage. Clothes always matter, apparently, no matter what the age or the circumstance! I used to own a very large miniature case in silver which my father was in the habit of carrying everywhere with him and in it was the only portrait I ever had of my mother. In 1928, after carting it all over the world with me, it was stolen one summer when I was away from our house at Stamford, Conn., where we then lived, and with it went my Bible and a broken rocking-chair. It was the most curious choice of things to steal of which I have ever heard.

The Bible was the greatest personal loss. It was a unique Bible and had been my cherished possession for twenty years. It had been given me by a close, girlhood friend, Catherine Rowan-Hamilton, and was printed on thin writing paper with broad margins for notes. The margins were nearly two inches wide and on them you would have found recorded in microscopic writing (done with an etching pen) my spiritual history. It had in it tiny photographs of close friends and autographs of my spiritual companions on the Way. I wish I had it now for it would tell me much, remind me of people and episodes and help me to trace my spiritual unfoldment - the unfoldment of a worker.

When I was a few months old I was taken to Montreal, Canada, where my father was one of the engineers engaged in building the Victoria Bridge over the St. Lawrence River. There my only sister was born. I have only two vital memories of that time. One was managing to get into serious trouble with my parents because I enticed my small sister into an enormous trunk in which our many, many toys were kept. We were lost for quite a while and nearly suffocated, [21] for the lid shut down on us. The second was that I made my first attempt to commit suicide! I just did not find life worth living. The experience of my five years made me feel that things were futile so I decided that if I bumped down the stone kitchen steps from top to bottom (and they were very steep) I would probably be dead at the end. I did not succeed. Bridget, the cook, picked me up and carried me (battered and bruised) upstairs where I met much comforting - but no understanding.

As I went on in life, I made two other efforts to put an end to things, only to discover it is a very difficult thing to commit suicide. All of these attempts were made before I was fifteen. I tried to smother myself with sand when I was around eleven years old, but sand in one's mouth, nose and eyes is not comfortable and I decided to postpone the happy day. The last time, I tried to drown myself in a river in Scotland. But again the instinct to self-preservation was too strong. Since then I have not been very interested in suicide, though I have always understood the impulse.

This constantly recurring misery was perhaps the first indication of the mystical trend in my life which later motivated all my thinking and activities. Mystics are people with a tremendous sense of dualism. They are ever seekers, aware of something which must be sought; they are always lovers, searching for something worthy of their love; they are ever conscious of that with which they must seek unity. They are governed by the heart and by feeling. At that time I did not like the "feel" of life. I did not appreciate what the world seemed to be or had to offer. I was convinced that better things lay elsewhere. I was morbid, full of self-pity, through loneliness, exceedingly introspective (which sounds better than self-centered) and convinced that no one liked me. Looking back, why on earth should they? I cannot blame them. I gave them nothing of myself. I was [22] preoccupied all the time with my reaction to people and circumstances. I was the unhappy, self-dramatized center of my little world. This sense of better things somewhere and a capacity to "feel" into people and circumstances and to know often what they were thinking or experiencing was the beginning of the mystical phase of my life and out of it emerged much good that I later found.

Thus I began consciously the age old search for the world of meaning which must be found, if any answer to the perplexities of life and the sorrows of humanity is to be discovered. Progress is rooted in the mystical consciousness. A good occultist must be, first of all, a practicing mystic (or do I mean a practical mystic - perhaps both) and the development of the heart response and the power to feel (and to feel accurately) should naturally and normally precede the mental approach and the power to know. Surely spiritual instinct must precede spiritual knowledge, just as the instincts of the animal, the child and of the undeveloped person always precede intellectual perception. Surely vision must come before the mode to make the vision a reality is mastered. Surely questioning and a blind feeling after God must antedate the conscious treading of "The Way," which leads to revelation.

Perhaps the time will come when our adolescent boys and girls will receive some attention along the lines of capitalizing on their normal, mystical tendencies. These tendencies are so often dismissed as adolescent fancies which will ultimately be outgrown. To me, they indicate parental and tuitional opportunities. This period could be utilized in a most constructive, directional manner. The orientation of the life could be determined and much later miseries offset, if the cause and the purpose of the questioning, of the inarticulate longings, and of the visionary aspirations were grasped by those responsible for young people. It could be [23] explained to them that a process was working in them which was normal and right, which was the result of past lives of experience, which indicated that the mental side of their nature should receive attention. Above all, the soul, the inner spiritual man, could be indicated, as seeking to make its presence felt. The universality of the process should be emphasized, thus dismissing the loneliness, and the false sense of isolation and peculiarity which are such disturbing features of the experience. I believe that this method of capitalizing on the adolescent urges and dreams will later receive more attention. I regard the silly adolescent miseries through which I passed as simply the opening of the mystical phase in my life which - in time - gave place to the occult phase, with its greater assurance, its understanding and its unalterable convictions.

After we left Canada, my mother got seriously ill and we went to Davos, Switzerland, and were there for several months until my father brought her back to England to die. After her death we all went to live with my grandparents at their place, Moor Park, Surrey. My father's health was by that time seriously impaired. Living in England did not help him and a short time before his death we children were moved with him to Pau in the Pyrenees. I was eight years old by that time and my sister was six. The disease was, however, too far progressed and we came back to Moor Park and were left there whilst my father (with a nurse-valet) went on a long sea voyage to Australia. We never saw him again as he died en route to Tasmania from Australia. I remember well the day when word came to my grandparents of his death and I remember also later when his valet turned up with his things and valuables. It is curious how little details such as this man handing over my father's watch to my grandmother remain in one's memory whilst things of greater importance seem lost to recollection. [24] One wonders what it is that conditions the memory in this way; why some things register and others do not.

Moor Park was one of those large English houses which should not be homey in any way and yet manage to be so. It was not particularly old, having been built in the time of Queen Anne by Sir William Temple. He it was who introduced tulips into England. His heart - enclosed in a silver casket - was buried under the sundial in the middle of the formal garden, outside the library windows. In its way Moor Park was a show place and on certain Sundays was thrown open to the general public. I have two recollections of that library. I remember standing at one of its windows and trying to picture the scene as Sir William Temple must have seen it - with its formal gardens and terraces, peopled by great lords and ladies in the dress of the period. And then another scene, this time not imaginary; I saw my grandfather's coffin in which he lay in state with only one great wreath upon it, sent by Queen Victoria.

The life of my sister and myself at Moor Park (where we lived till I was nearly thirteen) was one of great discipline. We had had lives of travel and change and I am sure the discipline was badly needed. The various governess we had applied it. The only one I remember in those early days was called by the peculiar name, Miss Millichap. She had lovely hair, a plain face, wore dresses of great prudery, buttoned up tight from the hem to the throat and she was always in love with the current curate; a hopeless love, for she never married any of them. We had an immense schoolroom at the top of the house where a governess, a nurse and a maid were responsible for the two of us.

The discipline, then applied, continued until I was grown up and looking back now I can realize how frightfully severe it was. Every thirty minutes of our lives were arranged for and even today I can see the chart hung on the wall of [25] our schoolroom, indicating the next duty. How well I remember going over to it and asking myself: "What now?" Up at 6 a.m., rain or shine, summer or winter; practicing scales for an hour or preparing the day's lessons if it was my sister's turn for the piano; breakfast at 8 a.m. sharp, in the schoolroom, and then down to the dining room at 9 for family prayers. We had to start the day right with a recollection of God and, in spite of the austerity of the family faith, I think it is a good habit. There sat the head of the household with the family Bible in front of him and the family and guests gathered around him; then the servants filed in according to their duties and rank - the housekeeper, the cook, the ladies' maids, the head housemaid and the under housemaids, the kitchen maid, the scullery maid, the footmen, and the butler to close the door. There was real devotion there and much revolt, true aspiration and intense boredom, for such is life. The sum total of the effect, however was good and we could do with a little more recollection of divinity these days.

Then from 9.30 till noon we worked at our lessons with our governess and this was followed by a walk. We were allowed to have lunch in the dining room but were not permitted to speak and our good behavior and silence were under the anxious eyes of our governess. To this day I can remember going off into a reverie or day dream (as all children do) with my elbow on the table and gazing out of the window. I was suddenly brought back to everyday life by hearing my grandmother say to one of the footmen, waiting at table: "James, fetch two saucers, please, and put Miss Alice's elbows into them." This James obediently did and for the remainder of the meal there my elbows had to be. I have never forgotten the humiliation and even today, more than fifty years later, I am still conscious that I am breaking rules if I put my elbows on the table - which I do. After [26] lunch we had to lie on a flat sloping board for an hour whilst our governess read aloud some improving book and then again a walk followed, after which we did our lessons till five o'clock.

At that hour, we had to go to the bedroom where the nurse or maid got us ready to go down to the drawing room. White frocks, colored sashes, silk stockings and well brushed hair were the order and then, hand in hand, we had to go to the drawing room where the house party were sitting after tea. There we stood in the doorway and made our curtsies and thus endured the misery of being talked to and inspected until our governess came to fetch us. Our own schoolroom supper was at 6:30 and after it was finished we again had our lessons to do till 8 p.m., bedtime. There was never any time in those Victorian days to do anything which we, as individuals, might want to do. It was a life of discipline, rhythm and obedience, varied occasionally by spurts of rebellion and consequent punishment.

As I have watched the life of my own three girls in the United States, where they were born and lived until in their late teens, and as I saw them go through the public school system of the country, I have wondered how they would have liked the regimented life I and my sister lived. With more or less success, I have tried to give my daughters a happy life and when they grumbled over the hardness of life - as all young people normally and naturally do - I have been forced to recognize what a perfectly wonderful time they have had compared to the girls of my generation and social background.

Until I was twenty my life was completely disciplined by people or by the social conventions of the time. I could not do this; I could not do that; such and such an attitude was incorrect; what will people think or say? You will be talked about if you do so and so; that is not the sort of person you [27] can know; do not talk to that man or woman; nice people do not speak or think like that; you must not yawn or sneeze in public; you must not speak unless you are spoken to, and so on and so on. Life was entirely hedged in by things impossible to do and conducted under the most minute rules governing every possible situation.

Two other things stand out in my recollection. From the earliest possible time we were taught to care about the poor and the sick and to realize that fortunate circumstances entailed responsibility. Several times a week when it was time to go for a walk we had to go to the housekeeper's room for jellies and soup for some sick person on the property, for baby clothes for the new baby at one of the lodges, for books for someone who was confined to the house to read. This may be an instance of the paternalism and the feudalism of Great Britain but it had its good points. It may be a good thing that it has disappeared - personally I believe it is - but we could do with that trained sense of responsibility and of duty to others among the wealthy in this land. We were taught that money and position entailed certain obligations and that these obligations must be met.

The other thing I remember vividly was the beauty of the countryside and the flowery lanes and the many woods through which my sister and I drove our little pony carriage. It was what was called in those days "a governess cart," designed, I presume, specially for small children. On summer days my sister and I used to take it out, accompanied by a little page boy in uniform and buttons and a cockaded hat, standing on the step. I wonder sometimes if my sister ever thinks of those days.

After my grandfather's death, Moor Park was sold, and we went for a short while to live with our grandmother in London. My major recollection of that time is driving round and round the park with her in a Victoria (as it was [28] called) with a pair of horses and coachman and footman in livery on the box seat. So dull and so monotonous it was. Then other arrangements were made for us but until her death, my sister and I spent much time with her. She was then a very old lady but showed signs even then of beauty; she must have been very good looking in her day, as a portrait of her, painted at the time of her marriage early in the 19th century, proves. The second time I came to the States after taking my eldest daughter, then a baby, home to see my people, I arrived in New York tired, ill, miserable and homesick. I went to the Gotham Hotel, Fifth Avenue, for lunch. Sitting in the lounge there, feeling very blue and depressed, I picked up an illustrated magazine. Opening it in idle fashion, to my surprise I saw my grandmother's portrait and the portraits of my grandfather and great-grandfather looking at me. It was such a surprise that I wept, but I did not feel so far away from all of them after that.

From the time of leaving London (when I was around thirteen) until our education was supposed to be completed, my whole life was one of change and constant movement. Neither my sister's health nor mine was considered very good, and we spent several winters abroad on the French Riviera where a small villa would be taken for us, close to the larger one of an uncle and aunt. There we had French teachers as well as a chaperoning resident governess and all our lessons were done in French. The summers we spent in another aunt's house in the south of Scotland, going back and forth from her home to visit other relatives and connections in Galloway. I can realize now what a rich life of contacts it was; there was much leisured beauty those days and very real culture. There was time to read and hours for interesting conversation. In the autumn, we would be down in Devonshire, accompanied everywhere by a governess, [29] Miss Godby, who came to us when I was twelve years old and who stayed with us until I went to a finishing school in London at the age of eighteen. She was the one person to whom I felt "anchored." She gave me a sense of "belonging" and was one of the few people in my life at that time who I felt truly loved me and believed in me.

Three people at that time gave me this feeling of confidence. One of these was my aunt, Mrs. Maxwell, of Castramont, of whom I have earlier spoken. We used to spend every summer with her and she was - as I look back - one of the basic, conditioning forces in my life. She gave me a keynote for living so that I feel to this very day that any achievement which I may have had can be traced back to her deeply spiritual influence. Until she died she kept in close touch with me, even though I had not seen her for twenty years prior to her death. The other person who always gave me understanding was Sir William Gordon of Earlston. He was not a blood relation but a connection by marriage and to all of us just "Uncle Billie." He was one of the men - a young lieutenant at the time - who led the "Charge of the Light Brigade" at Balaklava and rumor said he was the only man who came out of the charge, "carrying his head under his arm." I have often, as a child, felt the gold clasps which the surgery of that time had inserted in his skull. Anyway, he always stood up for me, and I can hear him now telling me (as he frequently did), "I bank on you, Alice. Go your own way. It will be all right with you."

The third person was this governess of whom I have told you. I had always kept in touch with her and saw her shortly before her death around 1934. She was then an old lady but seemed to me just the same. Two things interested her at that time. She asked my husband whether I still believed in Christ and seemed greatly reassured when he told her I most certainly did. The other thing she [30] took up with me concerned a shockingly naughty episode in my life. She wanted to know whether I remembered throwing every piece of jewelry she possessed down the toilet one morning, when I was about fourteen, and then pulling the plug. I most certainly did. It was a deliberate crime. I was furious with her about something, though I have quite forgotten what it was. I went to her room; I collected everything she had of value - wrist watch, brooches, rings, etc., etc., and disposed of them irretrievably. I thought that she could not possibly know that I had done it. But I discovered that she valued me and my development more than her own possessions. I was not, as you can see, a nice child. Not only did I have a temper but I always wanted to know how people ticked and what made them work and behave as they did.

Miss Godby used to keep a self-examination book in which, every evening, the record of the day's failures was entered and somewhat morbidly (from my present attitude to life) she analyzed her words and actions each day in the light of the question: "What would Jesus have done?" I had discovered this book one day in the course of my inquisitive prowling and made a practice of carefully reading her record. In this way, I found out that she did know that I had taken all her jewelry and destroyed it but that - as a matter of discipline for herself and in order to help me - she was not going to say one word to me until my own conscience prompted me to confess. She knew I inevitably would confess, as she had confidence in me - why I cannot imagine. At the end of three days I went to her and told her what I had done, only to discover that she was more distressed at my reading her private papers than she was over my destroying her jewelry. I made a full confession, you will note. That reaction of hers gave me a new sense of values. It made me furiously [31] to think, which was good for my soul. For the first time I began to differentiate between the spiritual values and the material. To her, it was a greater sin to be dishonest enough to read private papers than it was to destroy material things. She gave me my start in the first great lesson of occultism; to distinguish between the Self and the not-Self and between the intangible values and the tangible.

Whilst she was with us she came into money - not a great deal but enough to release her from earning a livelihood. But she refused to leave us, feeling (as she told me later when I was older) that I personally needed her care and understanding. I have been fortunate in my relationships, have I not, and primarily because people are so lovely, good and understanding. I want to go on record that she and my aunt, Margaret, gave me something of such true spiritual significance that to this day I attempt to live by the note that they struck. They were very different. Miss Godby was plain, quite ordinary in background and equipment, but sound and sweet. My aunt was exceedingly beautiful, well-known for her philanthropies and religious views but equally sound and sweet.

At 18 years of age I was sent to a finishing school in London, whilst my sister again went to the south of France with a governess. It was the first time we had ever been separated and the first time I was ever on my own. I do not think I was a great success at school; I was good at history and literature, really very good. I had been given a good classical education and there is something to be said for the intensive and individual training acquired if a child is taught by a good and cultured private teacher. But when it came to mathematics, even ordinary arithmetic, I was hopelessly bad - so bad that at this school it was dropped from my curriculum altogether as it was thought [32] impossible to permit a tall girl of 18 to do sums with the 12 year olds. I expect I am remembered (if I ever am, which is doubtful) as the girl who collected all the feather pillows and dropped them from the third floor on to the heads of the guests of the Headmistress as they marched in solemn procession into the dining room on the ground floor. This I did to the admiring whispers of the other girls.

Then followed an interval of a couple of years of very humdrum ordinary living. Our guardian rented a small house for us in a small town in Hertfordshire near St. Albans, installed us there with a chaperone and then left us to our own devices. The first thing we both did was to purchase the best bicycles to be then procured and to proceed to investigate the country side. To this day, I remember our intense excitement when the two crates arrived and we unpacked these pieces of shining mechanism. We rode everywhere and had a good time. We explored the district which was then pure country and not the citified suburb it has now become. I think that it was in this period I acquired my taste for mystery, later to be developed into a great love for detective and mystery stories. Pushing our bicycles up a very steep hill one sunny morning, two men on bicycles coasted down the hill and passed us. As one of them did so, he called back to his companion: "But I assure you, my dear chap, it stood on one leg and went like the devil." I am still pondering that mystery and have not yet arrived at any solution.

It was during this period that I made my first attempt at teaching. I took a class of boys in Sunday School. They were in their teens and were reported to be quite unmanageable. I stipulated that I was to teach them in an empty hall near the church but not in the Sunday School itself; that I was to be left alone whilst doing so. We had an exciting time. We started with a riot and me in tears, but [33] at the end of three months we were a close group of pals. What I taught and how I taught it is quite forgotten. All I remember is a lot of laughter and noise and much friendship. Maybe I did lasting good; I do not know: I do know that I kept them out of mischief for two hours each Sunday morning.

During those days and until I was 22 and became the mistress of my own small income (as did my sister), we lived the lives of society girls; we had what is called three "London seasons," participating in the usual round of garden parties, teas and dinners and being definitely in the marriage market. I was, at that time, deeply religious but had to go to dances as I did not want my sister to go to such wicked things without me. How I was tolerated by the people I met I do not know. I was so religious and so imbued by the mystical consciousness and my conscience was so morbidly sensitive that it was then impossible for me to dance with a man or sit next a person at dinner without ascertaining whether they were "saved" or not. I think the only thing that saved me from complete abhorrence and violent dislike was the fact of my sincerity and obvious hatred of having to enquire. Also, I was very young, very silly, very good looking and well dressed and - in spite of my ostentatious holiness I was smart, intelligent, well educated and sometimes interesting.

I have a sneaking respect for myself as I look back for I was so painfully shy and reticent that I suffered untold agonies as I screwed myself up to express this concern for the souls of strangers.

Apart from the fact that my aunt and my governess were religious people, what was it that made me so fixed in my spiritual aspiration and my determination to be straight good? That this determination took coloring from my religious environment has no real bearing on the question; [34] I knew nothing different than to express my spirituality in attending the early communion service every day, if possible, and in trying to save people. That particular expression of religious service and enterprise could not be helped and I eventually outgrew it. But what was the factor that changed me from a very bad tempered, rather vain and idle young girl into a worker and - temporarily - into a fanatic?

On June 30th, 1895, I had an experience which has made that date for me one that I never forget and always keep. I had been for months in the throes of adolescent miseries. Life was not worth living. There was nothing but sorrow and trouble on every hand. I had not asked to come into the world but here I was. I was just 15. Nobody loved me and I knew I had a hateful disposition and so was not surprised that life was difficult. There was no future ahead of me, except marriage and the humdrum life of my caste and set. I hated everybody (except two or three people) and I was jealous of my sister, her brains and good looks. I had been taught the narrowest kind of Christianity; unless people thought as I did, they could not be saved. The Church of England was divided into the High Church party which was almost Anglo-Catholic and the Low Church party which believed in a hell for those who did not accept certain tenets and a heaven for those who did. I belonged for six months of the year to one party and for six months of the year (when I was not in Scotland and under the influence of my aunt) to the other. I was torn between the beauties of ritual and the narrowness of dogma. Missionary work was dinned into my consciousness by both groups. The world was divided into those who were Christians and worked hard to save souls and those who were heathen and bowed down to images of stone and worshipped them. The Buddha was a stone [35] image; and it never dawned on me then that the images of the Buddha were on a par with the statues and images of the Christ in the Christian churches with which I was so familiar on the continent of Europe. I was in a complete fog. And then - at the height of my unhappiness and in the very middle of my dilemma and questioning - one of the Masters of the Wisdom came to me.

At the time of that happening and for many years after, I had not the remotest idea Who He was. I was scared stiff at the occurrence. Young as I was, I was intelligent enough to know something about adolescent mysticism and religious hysteria; I had heard religious workers discussing it. I had attended many revival meetings and had seen people "losing control" of themselves, as I called it. I, therefore, never mentioned my experience to any one for fear that they would class me as a "mental case" and one who would have to be carefully watched and handled. I was intensely alive spiritually. I was conscious of my faults to an abnormal degree. I was stopping with my Aunt Margaret at Castramont, in Kirkcudbrightshire, at the time and the atmosphere was exactly right.

It was a Sunday morning. The previous Sunday I had heard a sermon which had aroused all my aspiration. This Sunday, for some reason, I had not gone to Church. All the rest of the house-party had gone and there was no one in the house but myself and the servants. I was sitting in the drawing room reading. The door opened and in walked a tall man dressed in European clothes (very well cut, I remember) but with a turban on his head. He came in and sat down beside me. I was so petrified at the sight of the turban that I could not make a sound or ask what he was doing there. Then he started to talk. He told me there was some work that it was planned that I could do in the world but that it would entail my changing my disposition [36] very considerably; I would have to give up being such an unpleasant little girl and must try and get some measure of self-control. My future usefulness to Him and to the world was dependent upon how I handled myself and the changes I could manage to make. He said that if I could achieve real self-control I could then be trusted and that I would travel all over the world and visit many countries, "doing your Master's work all the time." Those words have rung in my ears ever since. He emphasized that it all depended upon me and what I could do and should do immediately. He added that He would be in touch with me at intervals of several years apart.

The interview was very brief. I said nothing but simply listened whilst He talked quite emphatically. Having said what He had come to say, He got up and walked out, after pausing at the door for a minute to give me a look which to this day I remember very distinctly. I did not know what to make of it all. When I had recovered from the shock, I was first frightened and thought I was going insane or had been to sleep and dreaming and then I reacted to a feeling of smug satisfaction. I felt that I was like Joan of Arc (at that time my heroine) and that, like her, I was seeing spiritual visions and was consequently set aside for a great work. What it was I could not imagine, but pictured myself as the dramatic and admired teacher of thousands. This is a very common mistake on the part of beginners and I see a lot of it today in connection with various occult groups. People's sincerity and aspiration do succeed in bringing them some inner, spiritual contact and they then interpret it in terms of personality success and importance. A reaction of over-stimulation. This reaction was succeeded by one in which the criticism He had made of me became uppermost in my mind. I decided that maybe after all I was not in the class of Joan of Arc but simply some one [37] who could be nicer than I had been and who could begin to control a rather violent temper. This I started to do. I tried not to be so cross and to control my tongue and for some time became so objectionably good that my family got disturbed; they wondered if I was ill and almost begged me to resume my explosive displays. I was smug and sweet and sentimental.

As the years went by I found that at seven years intervals (until I was thirty-five) I had indications of the supervision and interest of this individual. Then in 1915 I discovered who He was and that other people knew Him. From then on the relationship has become closer and closer until today I can, at will, contact Him. This willingness to be contacted on the part of a Master is only possible when a disciple is also willing never to avail himself of the opportunity except in moments of real emergency in world service.

I found that this visitor was the Master K.H., the Master Kut Humi, a Master Who is very close to the Christ, Who is on the teaching line and Who is an outstanding exponent of the love-wisdom of which the Christ is the full expression. The real value of this experience is not to be found in the fact that I, a young girl called Alice La Trobe-Bateman, had an interview with a Master but in the fact that knowing nothing whatsoever of Their existence, I met one of Them and that He talked with me. The value is to be found also in the fact that everything that He told me came true (after I had tried hard to meet requirements) and because I discovered that He was not the Master Jesus, as I had naturally supposed, but a Master of Whom I could not possibly have heard and one Who was totally unknown to me. Anyway, the Master K.H. is my Master, beloved and real. I have worked for Him ever since I was fifteen years old and I am now One of the [38] senior disciples in His group, or - as it is called esoterically - in His Ashram.

I make these statements with a definite purpose in mind. So much nonsense has been talked along these lines and so many claims made by those who have not the experience and the mental and spiritual orientation required, that true disciples are ashamed to mention their work and position. I want to make it easier for such disciples in the future, and to "debunk" the nonsense put out by many esoteric (so-called) schools of thought. The claim of discipleship is ever permissible; it gives nothing away and only carries weight if backed by a life of service. The claim that one is an initiate of a certain status is never permissible, except among those of the same rating and then it is not necessary. The world is full of disciples. Let them acknowledge it. Let them stand together in the bonds of discipleship and make it easier for others to do the same. Thus will the existence of the Masters be proved and proved in the right way - through the lives and testimonies of those They train.

Another happening about the same time carried conviction to me of another world of events. It is something which - at the time it occurred - I could not have imagined, having no indication that such a happening was possible. Twice I had a dream in full waking consciousness. I called it a dream because I could not imagine at that time what else it could possibly be. Now I know that I participated in something that really took place. At the time of this dual occurrence this knowledge lay outside my field of ordinary recognition. Herein lies the value of the happening. There was no opportunity for autosuggestion, wishful thinking or an over-vivid imagination.

I twice (whilst living and working in Great Britain) took part in an extraordinary ceremony and it was nearly two [39] decades after my participation that I discovered what it was all about. The ceremony in which I took part, I eventually found out, actually takes place every year at the time of the "Full Moon of May." It is the full moon of the Hindu calendar month of Vaisakha (Taurus) under its ancient name. This month is of vital importance to all Buddhists and the first day of this month is the national holiday known as the Hindu New Year's Day. This tremendous event takes place each year in the Himalayas. It is held in a valley and is not a mythical, subconscious happening but a real, physical plane occurrence. I found myself (whilst wide awake) in this valley and forming part of a vast, orderly crowd - mostly oriental but with a large sprinkling of occidental people. I knew exactly where I stood in that crowd and realized that it was my correct place and indicated my spiritual status.

The valley was large and oval shaped, rocky and with high mountains on either side. The people, crowded in the valley, faced towards the East and towards a narrow, bottlenecked passage at the end. Just before this funnel shaped passage there stood an immense rock, rising out of the floor of the valley like a great table, and on the top of the rock was a crystal bowl which looked as if it was three feet across. This bowl was full of water. Standing ahead of the crowd and in front of the rock were three Figures. They formed a triangle and, to my surprise, the one at the apex of the triangle seemed to me to be the Christ. The waiting crowd appeared to be in constant movement, and as they moved they formed great and familiar symbols - the Cross in its various forms, the circle with the point in the center, the five-pointed star and various interlaced triangles. It was almost like a solemn, rhythmic dance, very slow and dignified but quite soundless. Suddenly, the three Figures before the rock stretched out Their arms towards the heavens. The [40] crowd froze into immobility. At the far end of the bottleneck a Figure was seen in the sky, hovering over the passage and slowly approaching the rock. I knew in some subjective and certain fashion that it was the Buddha. I had a sense of recognition. I knew at the same time that in no way was our Christ belittled. I got a glimpse of the unity and of the Plan to which the Christ, the Buddha and all the Masters are eternally dedicated. I realized for the first time, though in a dim and uncertain manner, the unity of all manifestation and that all existence - the material world, the spiritual realm, the aspiring disciple, the evolving animal and the beauty of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms - constituted one divine and living whole which was moving on to the demonstration of the glory of the Lord. I grasped - faintly - that human beings needed the Christ and the Buddha and all the Members of the planetary Hierarchy, and that there were happenings and events of far greater moment to the progress of the race than those recorded in history. I was left bewildered, because to me (at that time) the heathen were still heathen and I was a Christian. Deep and fundamental doubts were left in my mind. My life was henceforth colored (and is today) by the knowledge that there were Masters and subjective events upon the inner spiritual planes and in the world of meaning which were a part of life itself, perhaps the most important part. How could I fit these things into my limited theology and my daily life. I did not know.

It is said that one's deepest and most intimate spiritual experiences should never be discussed or related. This is fundamentally true and no true "experiencer" is the least interested in such discussions. The deeper and more vital the experience, the less temptation is there to tell it. Only beginners with a theoretical, imaginative event in their [41] consciousness claim such experiences. But with deliberation I have related the two above subjective events (or was the first subjective?) because it is time that people of standing and who are recognized as sane and intelligent should add their testimony to that of the frequently discredited mystic and occultist. I have a good standing as an intelligent, normal woman, an effective executive and creative writer and I choose to add my certain knowledge and conviction to the witness of many others down the ages.

All this time, I was given to good works. I was an ardent Y.W.C.A. worker. I was present (on sufferance on account of my youth) at the meetings of the heads of the organization, because my aunt was the president. I spent much time visiting at large house parties where I was welcome because I was Alice La Trobe-Bateman and where I wrestled with the souls of my contemporaries in order to get them saved. I was very good at saving souls, but I wonder now - from the angle of more worldly wisdom - if they did not get saved with rapidity in order to get rid of me, so pertinacious and earnest was I. At the same time, the mystical trend of my life was steadily deepening; Christ was an ever-present reality to me. I would go off on to the moors in Scotland or wander away alone in the orange groves of Mentone in the south of France or the hillsides of Montreux on Lake Geneva and try to feel God. I would lie on my back in a field or by a rock and try to listen to the silence all around me and to hear the Voice - after the many voices of nature and within myself were stilled. I knew that behind all that I could see and touch there was a Something that could not be seen but which could be felt and which was more real and more truly essential than the tangible. I had been brought up to believe in a God Transcendent, outside His created world, inscrutable, unpredictable, [42] often cruel (to judge from what The Old Testament reports), loving only those who recognized Him and accepted Him, and slaying His only Son so that people like me could be saved and not perish everlastingly. Innately I criticized this presentation of a loving God, but automatically accepted it. But He was far away, distant and unapproachable.

Yet all the time, something within me, inchoate and indefinable, was reaching out after God Immanent, after a God behind all forms, Who could be met everywhere and touched and really known, Who truly loved all beings - good and bad - and Who understood them and their limitations and difficulties. This God was not, at all the tremendous and awful Deity to which the Christian Church, as I knew it, bowed down. Theologically, however, there was no such person. There was only a God to be appeased; Who was jealous of His rights; Who could murder His only Son in some illogical scheme to save mankind and Who was not as truly kind as the average parent to his offspring. These were the thoughts which I thrust away from me as wicked and untrue, but subtly, behind the scenes, they nagged at me. Yet there was always Christ. I knew Him; He struggled and yearned over humanity; He agonized to save them but seemed quite unable to save them on a large scale and had, therefore, to stand by and see them go to hell. I did not formulate all this clearly to myself at this time; I myself was saved and happy to be saved. I was working hard to save others and it was too bad that God had created hell but, naturally, I assumed that He knew what He was doing and - in any case - no real Christian questioned God: he simply accepted what he was told was God's dictum and that was that.

This was my spiritual background and field of thinking. [43] From the worldly angle things were not so easy. My sister and I had not married in spite of opportunity, a good stage setting and wide personal contacts. I think it was a very real relief to our uncles and aunts when we came of age, passed out of the Courts of Chancery and were definitely on our own. In effect I came of age when my younger sister reached the age of twenty-one.

A new cycle then started for us. We each of us went our own way. It turned out that our interests were totally different and the first cleavage between us appeared. My sister chose to take a medical degree and after some months of coaching went to Edinburgh University where she had a brilliant career. As for me, at the time I did not know exactly what to do. I had an exceedingly good classical education; I spoke fluent French and some Italian; I had enough money to take care of myself most comfortably in those comfortable and relatively inexpensive days. I had a firm belief in Christ, for was I not one of the elect; I believed in a heaven of happiness for those who thought as I did and a hell for those who did not, though I tried not to think too much about them after doing what I could to save their souls. I had a really deep knowledge of the Bible, good taste in clothes, really good looks and a most profound and complete ignorance of the facts of life. I had been told absolutely nothing about living processes and this was the foundation of much disillusionment as life went on and - at this time - I seemed subject to a most curious "protection" in the peculiar and unusual work which I chose to do in my next life cycle, from twenty-one to twenty-eight. I had led an entirely protected life and had gone nowhere unaccompanied by a chaperone, a relative or a maid. I was so innocent that for some reason I was apparently entirely safe. [44]

A peculiar happening when I was about nineteen years old demonstrates this. I had gone to stay at one of the great houses in England, taking my maid with me. Needless to say I cannot specify the name or place. I was the only person in that very large house party without a title. The first night that I was there, I noticed that my maid was preparing to sleep in the little sitting-room off my bedroom and when I expressed surprise she told me that she did not intend to leave me alone, whether I liked it or not. I did not understand anymore than I understood much of the conversation at meals. The many guests were, I am convinced, bored stiff with me; they considered me the complete idiot. The innuendo and the significance of the repartee left me guessing and feeling a fool. The only consolation I had was that I was well-dressed and smart and could dance. After I had been there two days, one morning, after breakfast, a very well-known man - charming, fascinating, good looking but with none too good a reputation - asked to speak to me. We went into what was called the red drawing room and when we were alone he said: "I have told your hostess that you are leaving on the 10:30 train this morning; the dog-cart will be around in time to take you to the station and your maid already has orders to pack your things." I asked him what on earth I bad done. He patted me on the shoulder and replied: "I'll give you two reasons. One is that you are a spoil sport from the point of view of most of the people here, although not from mine, for you always look so puzzled or so shocked. The other is that you do not look shocked sometimes when you should. That is really serious. I decided that you did not know any better and that I had better see that you were taken care of." I left as he had arranged, not knowing whether to be flattered or hurt. The episode, however, indicates not only [45] the stupidity and ignorance of girls of my class in those Victorian days, but also the fact that some very fast men are very nice and have understanding.

With this background and this equipment and with a firm determination that I was going to save lost souls, I set about doing something which I believed would be useful. I meant, however, to be free at any cost. [46]

Chapter II

Thus ended the carefree, the relatively irresponsible and the easy part of my life. It had lasted for 22 years, and was the only time in my entire life when I formed part of a family and had the background, the prestige and the security that this entailed. I had a good time; I had met many people; I had traveled a lot. I forget how often I have crossed the English Channel to the Continent and back for I have crossed so often. Fortunately I am a first class sailor and I love the sea no matter how rough. I cannot remember any personal friends except one, and she and I are still friends and exchange letters. We had met in Switzerland and together had learnt to make Irish needle-point lace. I was always proud of that achievement and specially proud when I once sold two yards of flounces for $30 a yard, the proceeds going to the Church Missionary Society, as in those days I needed no money.

But the time had now come when I felt the need to make myself of some use in the world and to justify my existence. In those days I expressed this urge in terms of "Jesus went about doing good," and I, as His follower, must do the same. So I began, furiously and fanatically, to "do good." I became an evangelist in connection with the British army.

Looking back to the time when I was working as an evangelist among British troops, I realize that it was the happiest and the most satisfactory time of my entire life. I quite liked myself and all that concerned me. I was doing what I wanted to do and I was very successful. I had not a care in the world and (apart from my chosen sphere of work) I had not a single responsibility. I realize, [47] however, that it was an important cycle in my life and that it completely altered all my attitudes. What happened to me during that period was unrealized at the time, but great interior changes took place. I was, however, so extroverted in my thinking and activities that I was relatively unaware of them. I had made a clean break with my family and had brought my life as a society girl to an end.

When I say "a clean break" I do not mean that I had severed all relations. I have always kept in touch with my family from then till now, but our paths have wandered far apart, our interests were and are widely different, and our relationship now is that of friends and not cousins, etc. Taking it by and large I believe I have had a more interesting and exciting life than they have. I have never felt that ties of physical blood amount to much. Why should people like each other and cling together because - fortunately or unfortunately - they happen to have the same grandparents? It does not seem reasonable, and I think has led to a lot of trouble. It is a happy thing when friendship and relationship coincide, but to me friendship, mutual interests and similar attitudes to life are far more important than blood ties. I want my daughters to like me because I am their friend and have proved myself friendly and worth liking. I am not expecting their confidence and liking because I am their mother. I personally love them for themselves and not so particularly because they are my children. I think once the need for the physical care of small children is no longer required that parents would do well to cultivate the friendship angle.

I was absolutely sure (how wonderful that seems to me today and how delightfully young) of everything - God, doctrine, my ability to do things, the sureness of my knowledge and the infallibility of any advice I might give. I had an answer for everything and knew just what should be [48] done. I handled life and circumstances at that time with the sure touch of complete inexperience and my answer to every problem, and my cure for every ill was always to be found in the answer to the one question: "What would Jesus do in similar circumstances?" Having decided what He would do (I wonder how I knew?) I went ahead and did it or advised others to follow the same rule. At the same time, unrealized and unexpressed, I was beginning to ask questions, though refusing to answer them, and underneath all the surety and dogmatism, great changes were taking place. I know that this period saw me take a definite step forward along the Path. Slowly, and without knowing it in my brain consciousness, I was transiting from authority to experience and from a narrow theological belief in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures and the interpretations of my particular school of religious conviction, into a certain and sure knowledge of the spiritual verities to which the mystics of all time have borne witness and for which many of them have suffered and died.

I found myself eventually possessed of a knowledge which has stood the test of time and trouble, as my earlier beliefs did not. It is a knowledge which reveals to me steadily and continuously how much, how very much, more I need to know. Real knowledge is never static; it is but a door opening on to vaster reaches of wisdom, achievement and understanding. It is a process of living growth. Knowledge should lead from one unfoldment to another. It is as if one had climbed a mountain peak and - at the moment of gaining the summit - suddenly there stretches before one a promised land to which one must inevitably proceed; but (across that promised land and away in the distance) another peak is seen emerging, hiding still vaster reaches of territory.

At one time in my life I used to look out of my bedroom [49] window and see in the distance that stupendous mountain pile, Kinchengunga, one of the highest peaks in the Himalayas. It looked so close, almost as if a day's walking would bring me to its foot but I knew that it would take at least twelve weeks hard trekking to get an able bodied climber there, and then there would be the terrific climb to its summit - a feat seldom accomplished. So it is with knowledge. That which is worth having is seldom of easy attainment and in itself only constitutes a foundation for more knowledge.

The people who fill me with a sense of compassion and the recognition of the need of patience are those who think they know and who have all the answers. That was my condition in those early days and I had not then the sense to be amused at myself. I was in deadly earnest. Today, I can laugh and today I am quite sure that I do not have all the answers. I find myself left with few if any doctrines and dogmas. I am sure of the existence of Christ and of the Masters who are His disciples. I am sure that there is a plan which They are attempting to work out on earth and I believe that They, in Themselves, are the answer and the guarantee of man's ultimate achievement and that as They are, so shall we all be some day. I can no longer say with assurance and aplomb what people ought to do. I seldom, therefore, give advice. I certainly do not pretend to interpret God's mind and to say what God wants as do the theologians of the world.

In the course of my life I suppose literally thousands of people have come to me for interpretation, for advice and suggestion as to what they should do. There was one period when my secretary was making appointments for me every twenty minutes. I expect one reason why I had so many appointments was that I never charged for them and people do love something for nothing. Sometimes I [50] could help if the person was open minded and willing to listen but most people just want to talk and lay the ground so that their own preconceived ideas are justified; they know beforehand what you should tell them. My technique has usually been to let people talk themselves out and by the time they had finished they frequently had themselves found the answer and solved their own problems, which is always so much sounder and leads to effective action. If, however, they are only wanting to hear their own voices and know everything, then I am helpless and often afraid.

I do not care if people agree or disagree with my particular brand of knowledge or formulation of truth (for we all must have that for ourselves) but they are impossible to help if completely satisfied with their own. To me, the ultimate hell (if there is a hell, which I very much doubt) would be a state of complete satisfaction with one's own viewpoint and therefore such a static condition that all evolution in thought and all progress would be permanently arrested. Fortunately, I know that evolution is long and steadily proceeding; history and civilization prove it. I know, too, that behind all intelligent processes stands a great Intelligence and that a static condition is impossible.

But in those days of which I write, I was a dyed-in-the-wool Fundamentalist. I started off my career completely convinced that certain fundamental, theological doctrines, as expressed by leading churchmen, were summations of divine truth. I knew exactly what God wanted and (because of my complete ignorance) I was ready to discuss every conceivable subject, knowing that my point of view would be right. Today, I often feel that there is just a chance that I am wrong in my diagnosis and prescription. I have also a staunch belief in the fact of the human soul and of the ability of that soul to lead a man "out of darkness into light and from the unreal to the Real" - to quote the oldest [51] prayer in the world. I had, in those days, to learn that "the love of God is broader than the measure of man's mind and the Heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind." But - it was not a really kind God that I proclaimed. God was kind to me because He had opened my eyes and the eyes of those who thought as I did, but He was quite ready to send the rest of the unregenerate world to hell. The Bible said so and the Bible was always right. It could not possibly be wrong. I agreed at that time with the pronouncement of a famous Bible Institute in the United States that "they took their stand upon the original, autographed manuscripts of the Bible." How I would today like to ask them where these autographed manuscripts are to be found. I believed in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures and knew nothing of the vicissitudes and the heart searching pains to which all honest translators of books are subjected and of how they are only able to approximate the meaning of the original text. Only during the past years when my own books have been in process of translation into various languages have I been aroused to the complete impossibility of verbal inspiration. If God had spoken in English, if Christ had preached His sermons in English then perhaps we might be more secure as to accuracy of the presentation. But such is not the case.

I remember once when eight or nine people (all of different nationalities) and my husband and I sat around a table on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Italy and tried to find the German equivalent for the Anglo-Saxon word "mind" or "the mind." One of my books was being translated into German and the question had arisen. They gave it up in despair for there is no true equivalent for what we mean when we speak about "the mind." The word "intellect" is not the same. They declared that the German word "geist" did not meet the need and though we searched [52] everywhere for some word expressing the same idea, it eluded us. And there were German professors trying to find the word along with us. Perhaps some of the trouble with Germany lies right there. It dawned on me then how intensely difficult a thing it is to translate correctly.

One of the words constantly occurring in occult books is the word "Path," meaning the Way back to our Source, to God, and to the spiritual center of all life. When translating it into French, what word shall we use? Le chemin? La rue? Le sentier? or what? When, therefore, you endeavor to translate a book as ancient as The New Testament into English, how can there be such a thing as verbal inspiration? All that you probably have is an old translation from the Aramaic or Hebrew into ancient Greek, and from the Greek into Latin, and from the Latin into Old English and thence, at a much later date, into the standard St. James Version. The same is true of biblical translations into all the many languages. I have been told that when The New Testament was being translated into French, some decades ago, they came to the words of Christ where He says, "I am the water of life." Joyously they translated it as "eau de vie" and proceeded to publish. Then they realized that those three words are the French name for "brandy," and had to reprint, making Christ say, "I am living water" - "eau vivante," which somehow is not exactly the same thing. Translations of the Bible have passed through many hands; they are the result of the theological thinking of many monks and translators. Hence the endless disputes by theologians over significances and meanings. Hence, also, the probably incorrect translation of very ancient terms and hence, also, the well meant but crude interpolations of the early Christian monks who tried to render into their mother tongue these ancient writings. I realize all this now but in those days the English Bible was infallibly [53] correct and I knew nothing about translation difficulties. This was my state of mind when a great change took place in my life.

My sister announced her intention to go to Edinburgh University and work for her medical degree and I was immediately faced with the problem as to what I was going to do. I did not want to live alone, or to spend any time travelling about and amusing myself. I did not, surprisingly, want to be a missionary. I was dedicated to good works, but what particular good works? I owe much to a clergyman at that time who knew me well and who suggested to me that I take up the life of an evangelist. I was not greatly intrigued. The evangelists I had met (and they were many) had not impressed me much. They seemed a badly educated bunch of people; they wore cheap and badly cut clothes and their hair seemed to need brushing; they were too good to be well-groomed. I could not picture myself yelling and ranting on platforms as they seemed to do and as the circumstances of arousing people seemed to require. I hesitated and wondered and talked it over with my aunt, and she also hesitated and wondered. Girls of my class, also, did not do that kind of thing. The clothes, diction, hair style and jewelry would not appeal to the kind of people who haunted revival meetings, seeking salvation. It was not proper. But I prayed and waited and believed that some day I would get "a call" and would know what I should do.

To fill in the interim I amused myself by falling in love (so I thought) with a clergyman by the name of Roberts. He was deadly dull and frightfully shy and years older than I and I got nowhere with him so I grinned and withdrew - literally, so you can see how deep my feeling went.

Then it was unexpectedly suggested to me that I should go and visit the Sandes Soldiers Homes in Ireland and, after settling my sister in her rooms in Edinburgh, I went [54] over to Ireland to investigate. I found that these Soldiers Homes were quite unique and that Miss Elise Sandes herself was a very exquisite, charming and cultured woman. Her workers were all girls and women of the same social set as myself. Miss Sandes had given up her entire life in an attempt to ameliorate the lot of "Tommy Atkins" and ran her homes along very different lines to those usually found in army camps and very different to the usual Gospel work to be found in our cities. She had many homes in Ireland and several in India. Among those working in the homes were several who became my friends and who helped me a lot to adjust myself to the changed environment - Edith Arbuthnot-Holmes, Eva Maguire, John Kinahan, Catherine Rowan-Hamilton and others.

My first experience was working in the Home in Belfast. All these homes were equipped with large coffee shops in which hundreds of men were fed nightly, paying for the food at cost. There were rooms where they could write letters, play games, sit around the fire and read the current papers, play chess and checkers and be talked to by us if they were feeling lonely, fed-up and homesick. There were usually two ladies in each home and we had our own quarters there. There was frequently a large dormitory where soldiers and sailors could stop for the night if out on pass, and also a Gospel-meeting room, equipped with a harmonium, hymnbooks, Bibles and chairs and someone who could expound the Scriptures and plead with the men for their souls' salvation. I had to learn all aspects of the work and hard work it was, though I found I loved every bit of it. The first months were the hardest. It is no easy thing for a shy girl (and I was abnormally shy) to walk into a room with perhaps three hundred men in it and, probably, not another woman present and make friends with them; go up and sit down beside them and play checkers; be nice to them, remain [55] impersonal and, at the same time, give the feeling that you cared about them and wanted to help.

I shall never forget the first Gospel meeting I took. I had been accustomed to a small Bible class of my own and to expressing myself at prayer meeting and I had no qualms at all. I was sure I could do it. It was much easier than introducing myself to some soldier, finding out his name, sitting down to play games with him, asking him about his home and gradually leading up to the serious matter of his soul. I, therefore, was quite ready to take the meeting.

I found myself one Sunday afternoon on a platform in a large room, facing a couple of hundred soldiers and some members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. I started off fluently, slowed down, got stage fright, gave those men one look, burst into tears and bolted off the platform. I swore that wild horses could not take me back but in due time and in answer to my perennial question, "What would Jesus have me do?" I crawled back. But the ridiculous thing was that, having come to that decisive conclusion, the next night I went to the meeting room to get ready and proceeded to light the gas. I nearly blew myself across the room and singed my hair and could not take the meeting that night. The explosion was like a full stop.

Several weeks later I returned. This time I had memorized my talk and my effort worked well until half way through there came a point where I had determined to quote some poetry, to give lightness and variety to my theme. I had rehearsed that poetry with telling effect before my mirror. The first two lines went well and then I stuck; I could not remember what came next. I had to come to a dead stop, red to the roots of my hair and feeling shaky. Then a voice came from the back of the room: "Cheer up, Miss. I'll finish it for you and that will give you time to think what you want to say next." But I had already vanished [56] off the platform and was dissolved in tears in my room. I had failed, both Jesus and myself, and I had better give it all up. I lay awake weeping all that night, refusing to open the door to one of my fellow workers who wanted to come in and comfort me. But I stuck it out; my pride would not permit me to refuse to speak on the platform and gradually I became accustomed to expounding the Bible to a crowd of men.

The process was painful, however. I would lie awake all the night preceding the talk, wondering what on earth to say and then I would lie awake all the night afterwards, in horror at the terrible way in which I had said it. This ridiculous rhythm went on until one night I faced up to myself and stuck at it until I found out what was wrong with me. I decided that I was suffering from pure selfishness and self-centeredness; I was caring too much what people thought of me. My early training was receiving its first hard blow. I came to the conclusion that if I was truly interested in my topic, if I really loved my audience and not Alice La Trobe-Bateman and if I could reach the point where I did not care a d...(I did not use that word then) I might get away with it and be really useful.

Curiously enough I have never had any trouble from that night on. I got accustomed to going into a packed room in India, with perhaps four or five hundred soldiers in it, and climbing on a table, get their attention and, what is more, hold it. I became a good speaker and learnt to like speaking, so that now I am really happier on a platform than anywhere else. Belfast saw me break free in that connection.

I remember once being sincerely flattered over the tremendous success of my Sunday night Bible class held at Lucknow, India, several years later. A whole crowd of army schoolmasters got into the habit of coming every Sunday to listen to me (always with several hundred other [57] men) and I began to get a touch of swelled head. I decided that I must be really good if intelligent men like that came Sunday after Sunday to hear me. I really let myself go. At the close of the series they made me a presentation. The senior man came forward at the end of my peroration and handed me a parchment scroll nearly a yard in length, tied with broad blue ribbon, and made me a pretty speech. I was too shy even then to unroll the scroll right there in front of them but when I got back to my quarters that night I untied the ribbon and there - in wonderful script - was every single grammatical error and every mixed metaphor I had perpetrated during the entire series. I considered myself cured and released permanently when I discovered that the effect upon me was to make me laugh till tears ran down my face.

Like many good speakers who use only brief notes and who speak largely extemporaneously and as their audience draws out of them the needed thoughts, I do not take down well stenographically. I look at the reports and say: "Could I have said it like this?" I am sure that the secret of good speaking, provided you have a flair for words, is to like your audience, and then to put them at their ease by being just human. I have never attempted to lecture. I just talk to an audience as I would to one human being. I take them into my confidence. I never pose as a know-it-all. I say: "This is how I see it now; when I see it differently I'll tell you." I never present truth (as I see it) in such a way that it is dogmatic. I often tell people: "Five thousand years hence this so-called advanced teaching will appear to be the ABC for little children, which shows how infantile we are now." At question time at the close of a lecture - a time I always enjoy - I don't mind admitting I don't know when I don't and that is quite often. These lecturers who think it lowers their prestige to admit lack of knowledge and [58] hence are evasive or pompous have much to learn. An audience loves a lecturer who can look at them and say: "Goodness, I haven't the least idea."

To return to Belfast. It was discovered by my superiors that I had quite a flair for saving souls and I made such a good record that Miss Sandes sent for me to join her at the Artillery Practice Camp in central Ireland and there get some real training. It was lovely green country and I shall never forget the day I arrived there. In spite, however, of the beauty, my major impression was eggs. Nothing but eggs everywhere. There were eggs in the bath tub; there were eggs in every pan; there were eggs in the drawers of my dressing table; there were eggs in boxes under my bed. If I remember rightly, there were one hundred thousand eggs in the house and they had to be in some kind of container. I discovered that we used seventy-two dozen eggs in the coffee shop of the Soldiers Home every night and as there were three homes in that district serviced by us, we used innumerable eggs. Therefore, eggs had precedence over everything - except the Gospel.

My first job each morning, after a quiet hour under a tree in the fields with my Bible, was to bake buns - hundreds of buns - often later in the day to load them into a pony cart (only the pony was a donkey) and take them over to the huts where were gathered the men at night. One day that donkey greatly humiliated me. I was proceeding gaily along a country lane, loaded up with buns, when I heard a battery of artillery galloping down the road towards me. Hurriedly I tried to move to the side of the road but that darned donkey simply planked his four feet firmly on the ground and refused to budge. Coaxing and whipping were useless. The battery halted a few feet away. The officers yelled at me to move. I could not. So finally a detail of men advanced and picked up me, the cart and the donkey and [59] dumped us in the ditch and then the battery proceeded on its way. I never heard the end of that episode from the artillery men. They spread the report that my buns were so heavy the poor donkey could not move and they would come limping into the hut and tell me that a crumb of one of my buns had dropped on a foot. I grew accustomed to the noise of the great guns and to the fact that the men were deaf the evenings that their batteries had been firing. I grew accustomed to drunkenness and learnt not to mind a drunken man and I learnt, also, how to handle him, but I never got accustomed to fried eggs, particularly when accompanied by cocoa. I suppose I have sold more cocoa, eggs and cigarettes than most people.

Those were happy, busy days. I adored Miss Sandes, as who did not? I loved her for her beauty, for her mental strength, for her knowledge of the Bible, for her understanding of humanity and also for her rippling sense of humor. I loved her most, I believe, because I discovered that she really loved me. I shared her bedroom in the funny little house in which we lived, and I can this minute see her lying asleep in the early morning light with a black stocking tied over her eyes to keep the light out. She was so much bigger and broader in her views than were her workers. I can remember her twinkling at them and saying nothing. We all worked so hard to save souls and she looked on and wished us success and often said the word that was needed; but I do know that often she looked on with the greatest amusement as we struggled and strove.

Once she gave me a real shock and started, I really believe, the cycle of interior questioning which later led me out of my theological morass. For three weeks I had been wrestling to save the soul of a perfectly wretched, dirty little soldier. He was what in England is called "a nasty piece of work" - a bad soldier and a bad man. I played [60] checkers with him night after night (which he liked) and I coaxed him into the Gospel meetings - which he tolerated. I begged him to be saved which had no effect. Elise Sandes looked on with amusement until apparently she decided it had gone on long enough. So one night she called me over to where she was standing by the piano in a hut packed with men, and the following conversation took place:

"Alice, you see that man over there?"
pointing out my problem to me.

"Yes," I said, "you mean the man I have been playing checkers with?"

"Well, my dear, would you mind looking at his forehead?"

I looked and remarked that it seemed very low. She nodded assent.

"Now look at his eyes. What is wrong with them?"

"They seem rather too close together," I replied.

"Exactly. And what about his chin and the shape of his head?"

"But he hasn't any chin and his head is very small and perfectly round," I said, completely puzzled.

"Well, then, Alice dear, why not leave him to God?"

With that she walked off. I have left many people to God since then.

Now right here let me go on record and say that I believed in conversion at that time and I believe in conversion today. I believed in the power of Christ to save then and I believe in it a thousandfold more today. I know that people can turn from the error of their ways and I have seen them again and again find that reality in themselves which St. Paul calls "Christ in you, the hope of glory." Upon that knowledge I stake my eternal salvation and the salvation of all mankind. I know that Christ lives and that we live in Him and I know that God is our Father and that, under God's great Plan, all souls eventually find their way back to [61] Him. I know that the Christ life in the human heart can lead all men from death to immortality. I know that because Christ lives we shall live also and that we are saved by His life. But I question our human techniques very often and I believe that God's way is often the best and that He  often leaves us to find our own way home, knowing that in all of us there is something of Himself which is divine, which never dies, and which comes to knowledge. I know that nothing in Heaven or hell can come between the love of God and His children. I know that He stays on guard watching "until the last weary pilgrim has found his way home." I know that all things work together for good to those who love God, and this means that we do not love some far off, abstract Deity but that we love our fellowmen. Loving our fellowmen is evidence - undefined, maybe, but just as sure - that we love God. Elise Sandes taught me that by her life and her love, her wit and her understanding.

My time in Ireland did not last very long but it was a delightful time. I had never been in Ireland before and a good deal of my time was spent in Dublin and at the Currach Camp, not far from Kildare. It was whilst at Currach that I did a most peculiar piece of work and one that would have left my family aghast had they known of it. I do not know that I would have blamed them. Remember that girls did not have the freedom that they now have and, after all, I was only twenty-two.

One of the batteries of the Royal Horse Artillery was at that time stationed at Newbridge Barracks, and the men of the battery (whom I had met up at the practice camp during the summer) asked me to go down there every evening to their Army Temperance Room. It meant getting there at 6 p.m. and returning very late at night, because they had permission for me to hold a Gospel meeting in their A.T.A. room after the canteen closed. After due [62] discussion, it was decided that I might accept and every evening I bicycled down after that abominable British meal, called "high tea." I returned every evening between 11 p.m. and midnight, escorted by two soldiers, the men in the battery arranging each evening who should bring me back and getting the necessary permits. I never knew whether my escort would be a nice, reliable Christian soldier or a blackguard. I believe that they cast lots as to who should take me home and if the lot fell on a drinking man, he was carefully prevented from visiting the canteen that day by his solicitous comrades. Anyway, picture to yourself a young girl with my appallingly protected, Victorian background, bicycling back every night with two Tommies of whom she knew nothing. Yet never once was a word spoken that could have outraged the most puritanical spinster, and how I loved it!

The canteen lot used to come to the room every evening to see me. I made no attempt to get them to attend the meeting but we got along well. It was there that I learnt to discriminate between the different types of drunks. There is, of course, the quarrelsome drunk and many is the drunken fight into which I have thrust myself - never getting hurt but proving a pest, I am sure. This type never bothered me and I never suffered from my intervention. The M.P.s used to welcome my help to get the men quieted down. I became quite an expert. Then there is the affectionate drunk and of him I was frankly terrified. I never knew what he would do or say but learnt always to keep a chair or table between myself and him. Lion tamers have found a strong chair very useful between themselves and a cross lion, and I can recommend it with full confidence in the case of an affectionate drunk. The morose drinker is far more difficult but not so common. One learns, too, to distinguish between those men whose drinking affects their legs and those whose heads [63] get affected and the technique employed for each is different. Many is the time when working among soldiers, I have been asked by the M.P.s to help them get a drunken soldier quietly home. They would keep out of sight but dose at hand and the spectacle would then be seen of me and the drunken man, making W's along the road. You can, perhaps, picture the horror of my aunt if she had ever seen this erratic progress, but I did it all "for Jesus' sake" and never once did a man attempt to be rude. However, I would surely have hated to see one of my own girls in a similar position and would have felt that what was good for the goose was not always good for the gosling.

My work was varied: keeping accounts, doing the flowers in the reading rooms, writing letters for soldiers, taking endless Gospel meetings, presiding at daily prayer meetings, studying my Bible assiduously and being very, very good. I bought every kind of book which might help me to preach better, such as Pegs for Preachers, Talks for Teachers, Discourses for Disciples, Outlines for Workers (I possessed books with these four titles myself) and others with equally tempting alliterative titles. I was often tempted myself to publish one entitled, Ideas for Idiots and even made a beginning but it never materialized. As far as I can tell, I got on well with my co-workers. My strong inferiority complex led me always to admire them and this effectively cut out all jealousy.

One morning Elise Sandes got a letter which I could see greatly disturbed her. The head of the work in India, Theodora Schofield, was not well and it seemed advisable for her to return home for a rest. But it seemed that there was no one who could be spared to go out in her place. She herself was getting old and Eva Maguire could not be spared. Miss Sandes with her usual directness said that she would send me, if she had the money because "even if you aren't [64] much good, you would probably be better than no one at all." Travel to India was expensive in those days and Miss Sandes had to pay for Theo's return. With my usual smug, religious reaction, I said, "If God means me to go He will send the money." She looked at me but made no comment. Two or three days later when we were having breakfast I heard, her exclaim, on opening a letter. Then she handed the envelope to me. There was no letter in it and no indication of the sender. Inside, however, was a bank draft for five hundred pounds, with the words, "For the work in India" written across it. We neither of us knew where the money had come from but accepted it as direct from God Himself. The problem of transportation was therefore solved and again she asked me if I would go to India for her at once, emphasizing that I was not, of course, much good but that she had no one else at that moment to send. I wonder sometimes whether my Master sent the money. It was essential that I go to India to learn certain lessons and to set the stage for the work which He had told me years before that I could do for Him. I do not know and I have never even asked Him, because it is not one of the things which matter.

I wrote to my people asking if I might go - meaning to go anyway, but wanting to do things correctly and at least be polite. My aunt, Mrs. Clare Parsons, wrote that she approved if I had a return ticket - so I got a return ticket. Then I went up to London to buy an outfit for India and having at that time no real monetary restrictions, I bought everything I wanted and had a grand time. I certainly "blew" myself. Incidentally, when the trunks containing all my new things arrived in Quetta, Baluchistan, I found that the entire contents had been stolen and filthy, dirty rags substituted in their place. Fortunately, I had taken plenty of things with me but it was my first important lesson in [65] learning that things are ephemeral. All the same, liking clothes, and I still do, I sent for another outfit.

My sister and aunt saw me off at Tilbury Docks and I must admit that I never enjoyed anything so much as that long three weeks voyage to Bombay. I have always loved travelling (as do all Gemini people) and being also at that time a horrid little snob, I reveled in the consciousness that my deck chair (which had been loaned me by an uncle) had a title on it. Little things please little minds and my mind was very little at that time - practically dormant.

I remember that first trip so well. There were two women besides myself at the table in the dining room and five apparently wealthy and most sophisticated men. They evidently liked us three women but I was appallingly shocked at them. They talked about gambling and racing; they drank a lot of liquor; they played cards and - worse than all - they never said grace at meals. The first meal left me stunned. After lunch I went to my cabin and prayed hard for strength to do the right thing. At dinner time my courage failed me and I had to do some more praying. But the result was that at breakfast the next morning I made a speech, taking care to be in the dining room before the other two girls arrived but all the five men were present. I was utterly terrified and thoroughly ashamed but I did what I thought Jesus would do. I looked at the men and said, nervously and rapidly: "I don't drink and I don't dance; I don't play cards and I don't go to the theatre, and I know you will hate me and I think I had better go and find another table." A dead silence descended upon us. Then one of the men (with a very well known name, so I won't mention it) got up and leaned across the table, held out his hand and said, "Shake. If you will stick to us, we will stick to you and we will try hard to be good." I had the most delightful voyage. Those men were unbelievably [66] good to me and I remember them with affection and gratitude. It was the nicest voyage I made and I made the trip between London and Bombay six times in five years, so I had some experience. Whether these men had a good time is another matter, but they were unfailingly nice to me. One of them later sent me a lot of religious books for one of the Soldiers Homes. Another sent a nice, fat check and still another, a prominent railroad man, sent me a free pass on the Great Indian Peninsula Railroad which I used all the time I was in India.

When we got to Bombay I had expected to trans-ship there and take the British India boat to Karachi and so on to Quetia, Baluchistan. But it was not to be at that time, though I did do that trip later. I found a wire awaiting me, telling me to get off at Bombay and take the express to Meerut, which is in central India. I was appalled. I had never in my life traveled alone before. I was arriving in a continent where I did not know one single human being and I had to change not only my steamship ticket to Karachi, but get train tickets on the G.I.P. to Meerut. Like a homing pigeon, I fled to the Y.W.C.A. where they were very good to me and attended to all the business details. Remember, again, that I was young, pretty, and that girls did not do what I was doing.

At the Bombay railroad station I had a very human and educational experience. This experience goes to show how wonderful human beings are, which, if you will note, is one thing I can and do prove in this book. I was, as you may have gathered, a consummate prig, even if well-intentioned. I was almost too good to live and certainly holy enough to be hated. I had taken no part in the current life of the ship, but had strutted about the deck with my large Bible under my arm. There was one man on the ship who was my pet abhorrence and had been ever since I left [67] London. He was the life of the ship; he handled the daily sweepstakes; he got up the dances and arranged the theatricals; he played cards and I knew that he drank an inordinate amount of whiskies and sodas. The voyage took three weeks in those days and I watched him with disdain all the time. From my point of view, he was the devil. He had spoken to me once or twice, but I had made it very clear that I wanted nothing to do with him. Waiting for the train that day in the big Bombay railroad station, scared stiff and wishing I had never come, this man came up to me and said, "Young lady, you don't like me and have made that very clear, but I have a daughter about your age and I am damned if I would like to have her travelling alone in India. Whether you like it or not, you are going to show me which is your compartment. I want to look over your travelling companion and you can make the best of my decision. I am also coming to fetch you for meals at the stations where we have to get off to eat." What came over me I do not know but I looked him straight in the eye and said, "I am frightened. Please look after me." This he most adequately did and the last sight I ever had of him was standing in his pyjamas and dressing-gown in the middle of the night at a railroad junction, tipping the guard to look after me as he could go no further on my way.

Three years later I had gone to Rhanikhet in the Himalayas to open up a new Soldiers Home there. A runner came in from an outlying district, bringing a note from a friend of this man, begging me to go to him as he had only a short time to live and needed some spiritual help. He had asked for me. My fellow-worker refused to let me go; she was chaperoning me and was utterly shocked. I did not go and he died alone. I have never forgiven myself - but what could I do? Tradition, custom and the woman responsible for me worked against me, but I felt miserable and [68] helpless. On the way to Meerut from Bombay he had told me bluntly, one night at dinner, that I was not a bit as smug and holy as I looked and that he had an idea that I would some day discover that I was a human being. He was at that time in deep waters and in trouble and wouldn't I try to help him? He was returning from England where he had had to put his wife in a lunatic asylum; his only son had just been killed and his only daughter had run away with a married man. He had no one left. He wanted nothing from me but a kind word. That I gave him, for I grew to like him. When he came to die he sent for me. I did not go and I am sorry.

From this time on my life became very hectic. I was (in the absence of Miss Schofield) supposed to be responsible for quite a number of Soldiers Homes - Quetta - Meerut - Lucknow - Chakrata, and two Homes which I helped open - Umballa and Rhanikhet - in the Himalayas, no great distance from Almora. Chakrata and Rhanikhet were in the foothills, about five or six thousand feet up and were, of course, summer stations. From May till September we became "hill parrots." There was another home in Rawal Pindi, but I had nothing to do with that, except that I went there for a month once to release Miss Ashe, who was in charge. In each of these homes there were two ladies and two managers, who were responsible for the running of the coffee shop and the general maintenance of the place. They were usually ex-soldiers and I have the happiest remembrance of their kindness and helpfulness.

I was so young and inexperienced; I knew not a single person in the whole continent of Asia; I needed more protection than I realized at the time; I was prone to do the stupidest things, simply because I knew no real evil and had not the faintest idea what kind of things could happen to girls. Once, for instance, I was suffering from excruciating [69] toothache and it reached the point where I could endure it no longer. There was no regular dentist then in the cantonment where I was working but occasionally an itinerant dentist (usually an American) would come through, set up shop in the "dak" bungalow (or rest house) and do what work had to be done. I heard one was then in town, so down I went, all alone, without any word to my fellow-worker. I found a young American and his assistant, another man. The tooth was in a bad way and had to come out so I begged him to give me gas and pull it out. He looked at me in rather a peculiar manner but proceeded to do as I asked. When I came out of the gas and was feeling myself again, he read me the riot act, telling me that I had no means of knowing that he was a decent man, that whilst under gas I was completely in his power and that it was his experience that stray men, wandering around India, were no better than they should be. Before going he extracted a promise from me to be more careful in the future. I have been - as a general rule - but I remember him with gratitude, even though I have forgotten his name. In those days I was utterly fearless; I did not know what it was to be afraid. Part of this was a natural thoughtlessness, part of it ignorance, and part of it a surety that God would take care of me. Apparently He did, on the principle, I suppose, that drunken men, infants and fools are not responsible, and must be guarded.

The first place, therefore, to which I went was Meerut, where I made the acquaintance of Miss Schofield and was taught some of the things I would have to know in temporarily taking over from her. My major trouble really was that I was too young for the responsibility. Things that happened took too much out of me. I had no experience and, therefore, no sense of relative values. Things that did not matter much seemed to be quite appalling, and really [70] serious things did not strike me that way. Looking back over the years and taking it by and large, I do not think I really did so badly.

I was at first almost stunned by the wonder of the Orient. It was all so new, so strange, so utterly different to anything I had imagined. Color, beautiful buildings, dirt and degradation, palm trees and bamboos, lovely little children and women (in those days) carrying water-pots on their heads; water buffaloes and queer carriages, such as gharries and ekkas (I wonder if they have them now) crowded bazaars and streets of native shops, silverware and beautiful carpets, silent-footed natives, Moslems, Hindus, Sikhs, Rajputs, Gurkhas, native soldiers and policemen, an occasional elephant with his mahout, strange smells, unfamiliar language, and always the sun, except during the monsoon - always and ever the heat. Such are some of the memories I have of that time. I loved India. I have always hoped to go back but fear I shall not manage it this life. I have many friends in India, and among Indians who live in other countries. I know something of the problem of India, of its longing for independence of its internal strife and conflicts, of its multiple languages and races, its teeming population and its many creeds. I do not know it intimately for I was only there a few years, but I loved the people.

People here in the United States know nothing of the problem and that is why they can advise Great Britain on what should be done. The rabid speeches of fiery Hindus over here loom larger than the calm assurances of the British Raj that as soon as Hindus and Moslems resolve their differences, India can have dominion status or complete independence. Time and again, the attempt has been made to arrive at a constitution in which the Moslem (the powerful, rich and warlike minority - a minority of seventy [71] millions) and the Hindus can live together; a constitution which will satisfy both groups, as well as the Indian principalities and the millions of people who do not recognize or respond to the Indian Congress Party.

I asked a prominent Hindu a few years ago what he thought would happen if the British withdrew all their troops and their interest out of India. I asked for a truthful answer and not just propaganda. He hesitated and said: "Riot, civil war, murder, pillage and the slaughtering of thousands of peace-loving Hindus by the Moslem." I suggested that the slower method of education might, therefore, be wiser. He shrugged his shoulders and then turned on me and said: "What are you doing, Alice Bailey, in a British body? You are a reincarnated Hindu and have had a Hindu body for many lives." "I expect I have," I replied, and then we discussed the undeniable fact that India and Great Britain are closely related and have much karma to work out together and will have to work it out sometime, and the karma is not all British.

It is an interesting fact that during the past war the system of drafting men was never applied to India but several millions voluntarily enlisted, whilst only a very few collaborated with the Japs, out of a population in India and Burma of over 550 millions. India will and must be free, but it must come about in the right way. The real problem is not between the British and the population of India but between the Moslems, who conquered India, and the Indians. When that internal problem is solved, India will be free.

Some day we shall all be free. Racial hatred will die out; citizenship will be important but humanity as a whole much more so. Boundaries and territories will assume their rightful place in man's thinking, but goodwill and international understanding will matter more. Religious differences [72] and sectarian dislikes must eventually vanish and we shall eventually recognize "one God and Father of all, Who is above all and through all and in us all." These are no idle and visionary dreams. They are slowly emerging facts. They will emerge more rapidly when the right educational processes condition the coming generations; when the churches awaken to the fact of Christ - not to the fact of theological interpretations - and when money and the products of the earth are regarded as goods to be shared. Then these critical international problems will assume their rightful place and the world of men will move forward in peace and security towards the new culture and the future civilization. Maybe my prophesies don't interest you. But these matters interest me and all people who love their fellowmen.

I have very little recollection of anything particular which happened during these first weeks in Meerut but my real experience started in Quetta. My work in the Quetta Soldiers Home stands out in my mind as one of the most interesting phases of the work. I like Quetta. It stands about 5000 feet high and is very hot and dry in the summer and 45^° below zero in the winter. Yet, in my day, even in the bitterest cold, we had to wear sun helmets. I find that sun helmets are not worn so much these days and two of my daughters, who have been in India for years with their husbands, seldom wore them and laugh at my ideas. But in my day they were de rigeur.

Quetta is the largest town in Baluchistan, and Baluchistan is a kind of buffer state between India and Afghanistan. I spent nearly two years there, off and on, though I went down into India several times, crossing the Sind Desert five times. There is very little vegetation in Baluchistan, except juniper trees, until the land is irrigated and then anything can grow. The roses in Baluchistan are [73] something that I have seldom seen equaled anywhere and in my day they blazed in every garden. In the spring the country is a riot of cosmos and then later come the sunflowers. Thereby hangs a tale. I was speaking to my Sunday Bible class in Quetta one afternoon and telling the soldiers how the human being naturally and normally turns towards God. I used the sunflower as an illustration of this, pointing out that it was called sunflower because it followed the sun in the heavens. The next morning a soldier came to the door of our sitting-room, with a very grave face, and asked if I would mind coming out into the garden for a minute. I followed him and, without a word, he pointed to the sunflowers. Every single one of them, hundreds of them, had their backs to the sun.

Quetta was the place where I first shouldered responsibility and was, more or less, on my own, though Miss Clara Shaw was with me. The troops up in Quetta had taken possession of the Soldiers Home to such an extent that they got quite seriously out of hand. The lady in charge, I fancy, got a little scared, though she probably was not as scared as I was. A gang of soldiers were having a grand time night after night trying to break the place up. About twenty of them would come down from barracks together. They would go into the coffee-shop, order cocoa and fried eggs and then spend the rest of the evening shying jugs of cocoa and fried eggs at the walls. The result can easily be imagined. The mess was abominable and their attitude was worse. So I was sent up to see what could be done. I was simply terrified and did not know what to do. I spent the first few evenings wandering in and out of the coffee-shop and reading-rooms, only to find that my presence made them worse. Word had gone out that I was a hard-boiled young thing and that I was liable to report [74] them to the authorities. They were, therefore, out to show me.

When I had at last discovered just who they were and who were the ring-leaders, I sent an orderly up to the barracks one morning to ask those of them who were not on duty to come down to the Soldiers Home at a certain hour. For some reason, none of them was on duty and sheer curiosity brought them all out. When they arrived, I loaded them into native carriages (gharris), put in all the makings for a picnic and drove to a place that in those days was called Woodcock Spinney. It was a lovely, hot, clear day and the fact that the place was then infested with snakes (kraits, deadly and small) did not seem to bother us. There we made tea and told silly stories; we asked riddles and never once did we talk religion and never once did I refer to their iniquities and then, as evening came on, we went home. I had said not a word of censure, of criticism, of request or pleading. They were certainly a bunch of mystified men. All through the evening I said nothing and, still bewildered, they went back to barracks. The next afternoon one of our coffee-shop managers sought me out and asked me if I would mind coming to the coffee-shop for a minute. There I found all these men cleaning the walls and painting them, scrubbing the floors and making the place much nicer than it had ever been before. The question in my mind is: was I too terrified to bring the matter up or was I just clever? The episode happened: I did not intentionally plan it.

I learnt a great lesson at that time. I proved to myself, with much surprise, that understanding and love will work with individuals when condemnation and accusations will fail. I never had any more trouble with that gang. One of them is still my friend although I have lost sight of all the rest during the forty years which have elapsed since then. [75] This man came to see me when I was in London in 1934 and we talked of those far away times. He is doing well. I made, however, a disturbing discovery. These men had been won over to better things, not by my eloquent preaching or by any emphasis upon the theological precept that the blood of Jesus could save them, but simply by loving understanding. I had not believed that that was possible. I had yet to learn that love is the keynote of the Christ's teaching and that it is His love and life that saves and not any violent theological pronouncements over the fear of hell.

There are many little incidents connected with this time in India that I could relate but they are probably of more interest to me than anyone else. I went from one Home to another, attending to the accounts, interviewing the managers, holding endless Gospel meetings, talking to the soldiers about their souls or their families, visiting in the military hospitals and dealing with the many problems which naturally arise when hundreds of men are stationed away from home and are faced with the problems of life in a hot climate and an alien civilization. I became very well known to many regiments. I once totaled up the number of regiments I had worked with in Ireland and India and found I had worked with forty. Many of them had their own name for me. One famous cavalry regiment called me "Granny." Another regiment of the guards, for some unknown reason, always addressed me as "China." A well known infantry regiment always spoke of me or wrote of me as the B.O.L., which means the  "Benevolent Old Lady." The majority of the boys called me just "Mother," probably because I was so young. My correspondence got very heavy and I came to know the mind of the soldier very well and never found them talking as portrayed by Rudyard Kipling. In fact, the average Tommy Atkins resents his portrayal of them. [76]

I played thousands of games of checkers (draughts, as we call it in England) and became very good at the game, not because I play it Scientifically, but because I had an uncanny way of guessing what my opponent was going to do. The smell of cocoa and fried eggs was forever in my nostrils. I used to "vamp," as it was called, the popular songs on the piano in the reading-room until I got sick to death of hearing the men roar out, "Just like the ivy, I will cling to you," etc., or, "All the little pansy faces looking up at me to smile," which were the popular songs of the day. The men had their own versions of the words of them, however, which I tried my hardest not to hear so as not to have to interfere. I played hymns on the harmonium for hours and these I could almost play by heart. I had a very good mezzo soprano voice in those days with a wide range and exceedingly well trained. I lost it in singing in smoke filled rooms. I suppose I sold more packages of cigarettes than a tobacco store. I had a grand time leading the hymns at every meeting. Soldiers are flippant and it was not long before I learnt that when they shouted for the "chicken hymn" they meant, "Foul I to the fountain fly," etc., and that the hymn dealing with the "child she-bear" referred to the line, "Can a woman's tender care cease towards the child she bear." We used Moody and Sankey's hymn book which, from its really lovely, lilting tunes, has its points but as literature and poetry it is just too awful.

I remember one night at Chakrata I had announced the hymn, "Shall we Gather at the River," which goes on to assure us that if we do we shall be happy forever. I said in a loud, clear voice, "Now, men, whilst we sing this hymn we shall either sing it 'when we gather at the river we shall be happy foriver' or 'when we gather at the rever we shall be happy forever'." I looked up and there at the back of the room was a General, his adjutant and his staff who had [77] come down to inspect the home and see what we were doing. They discovered, with astonishment, a somewhat religiously flippant young woman in a white dress and blue sash who resembled no evangelist they had ever pictured. I would like to say here that I have always met with endless kindness from the officers of the various regiments and I suppose that the moments in my life (now far behind) when I really was preposterously conceited were coming out of church, after church parade, and getting saluted by the officers and men. The thrill I got is still with me.

My life was spent, during these formative years, almost entirely with men. Often for weeks at a time I spoke to no woman except my co-worker and current chaperone. I candidly admit to this day that I do not understand the feminine mind. This, of course, is a generalization and like all generalizations somewhat untrue. I have women friends and am devoted to them but, as a general rule, I prefer the masculine mind. A man will give you serious trouble occasionally; a woman will give you lots of silly little troubles all the time and I can't be bothered. I suppose I am no feminist but I know that if women are real and intelligent they can get to the top of the tree.

My mornings would be given to Bible study for I was taking an average of fifteen meetings a week, to current correspondence, to conference with the managers, and to tearing my hair over the accounts, for I never had the slightest head for figures. We were feeding five or six hundred men in each coffee-shop every evening and that meant much buying and selling. My afternoons would be spent in a hospital, usually in the wards where there were no women nurses, because there the need was the greatest. I would go from bungalow to bungalow of these big military hospitals with papers and pamphlets and books and, alas, loaded up with tracts. I can only remember two of the [78] tracts today. One was called, "Why the Bee Stung Mother" (and I never found out why) and the other was called, "Plain Talks to Plain People" and I always wondered why the good looking ones were exempt.

I got fairly well known in the hospitals and the chaplains of all denominations used to send for me constantly to sit with the boys when they were dying and, if I could do nothing to help, at least the dying man could hold my hand. I learnt one important thing as I sat with these men and watched them pass over to the other side and it was this: nature or God takes care of people at these times and they usually die quite unafraid and are often very glad to go. Or else, they are in a coma and are physically conscious of nothing. Only two of the men I was with when they were dying acted differently. One, in Lucknow, died cursing God and his mother and railing against life, and the other was a horrible case of hydrophobia. Death is not so awful when you are face to face with it. It often seemed to me like a kind friend and I never had the slightest feeling that something real and vital was coming to an end. I knew nothing of psychic research or the law of rebirth and yet, even in those orthodox days, I was sure it was a question of passing on to other work. Subconsciously I really never did believe in hell, and a lot of the men orthodox from the Christian point of view, ought to have gone there.

I intend no dissertation on death, but I would like to give here a definition of death which has always seemed to me to be adequate. Death is "a touch of the Soul which is too strong for the body"; it is a call from divinity that brooks no denial; it is the voice of the inner Spiritual Identity saying: Return to your center, or source, for awhile and reflect upon the experiences undergone and the lessons learnt until the time comes when you return to earth for another cycle of learning, of progress and of enrichment. [79]

Thus the rhythm and the interest of the work gripped me and I loved every minute of it in spite of the fact that my health was never good and I suffered from quite appalling migraine headaches. These would lay me low for days at a time, but I would always stagger up and do what had to be done. I was handling problems for which (as I have earlier said) I was quite unfitted and some of them were quite tragic. I had so little real experience of life that when I made a decision I never was at all sure that it was the best or right one. I was faced with issues that, looking back, I would hate to handle even today. Once a murderer took refuge with me having just shot his pal, and I had to give him up to justice when the police came and asked me to bring him out. Another time one of our managers absconded from one of the homes with all the funds and I spent the night chasing him down the railroad. I would ask you to remember this wasn't done in my day and my conduct was really quite outrageous from the angle of Mrs. Grundy.

Once I was at Lucknow and woke up one morning with the strong impression that I must leave immediately for Meerut. I had a first class free pass on the Great Indian Peninsula Railroad (G.I.P.) and could come and go as I liked all over northern India. My fellow worker tried to persuade me not to go, but I felt I was needed. When I arrived at Meerut, I found that one of the managers had had a sunstroke, had hit his head on a beam and gone insane. I found his young wife and child in a great state of mind. Suicidal mania had developed and the doctor warned me that a homicidal tendency might result. His young wife and I looked after him for ten days until I could arrange for his passage to Great Britain, where he ultimately recovered.

Another manager got depressed and kept threatening [80] to commit suicide. I studied him for awhile and got fed up with his constant threat, so one day I fetched the carving knife and begged him to leave off talking and do it. When he saw the knife he got seared and I then presented him with a ticket to England. These were some of the men who succumbed to the climate, to the loneliness and to the general discomfort of life in India in those days. We knew little psychology at that time and not much was done to handle the men from the angle of their mental problems. These are only some of the situations with which I was faced and with which I was quite unfitted to cope. It was this constant stream of emergencies which finally broke me down. Paralleling these events were many lovely times. I was successful in holding the men in the Homes and keeping them out of bad districts. I used to impute this to my deep spiritual power and my platform eloquence. I have an idea now that it was because I was young and gay and had no competition. There was no one else the men could talk to except the ladies in the Soldiers Homes. I suppose I had a knack, too, of making the men feel that I liked them, which I did.

I returned to England three times during my life in India as the long sea voyage of three weeks each way was believed good for my health. I am a first-class sailor and always feel quite at home on the sea. Once I spent three weeks returning to Great Britain and whilst there spent one week in Ireland, one week in Scotland, one week in England and then took the boat back to India. I have spent many days and months, all told, on the ocean. I have lost count of how many times I have crossed the Atlantic.

All this time I was steadily and forcefully preaching the old-time religion. I remained appallingly orthodox or - to use the more modern word - an unthinking Fundamentalist, for no Fundamentalist uses his mind. I had many [81] arguments with liberal minded soldiers and officers but adhered with dogmatic firmness to the doctrinal presentation that no one could possibly be saved and go to Heaven unless he believed that Jesus died for his sins in order to placate any angry God, or unless he became converted, which meant that he confessed his sins and gave up everything that he liked to do. He must no longer drink, play cards, swear, or go to the theatre and, of course he mustn't have anything to do with women. If he would not so change his life inevitably he went to hell at death where he burned forever in the lake of fire and brimstone. Little by little, however, doubts began creeping into my mind and three episodes in my life began to assume engrossing mental proportions. Their implications nagged at me and were largely responsible for an eventual change in attitude toward God and the problem of eternal salvation. Let me relate them and you will then see the sequence of my interior disturbance.

Years ago, when I was in my early 'teens, my aunt in Scotland had a cook called Jessie Duncan. We were very great friends ever since I was a little girl, escaping into her kitchen for a piece of cake which I knew would be there. During the day she was just the upper servant, standing when I went into the kitchen, never sitting in my presence, only speaking when spoken to and completely correct in all relations to me as to everyone else. But in the evenings, after her day's work was done and I had gone to bed, she would come to my room and sit on the edge of my bed and we would talk and talk. She was a very good Christian. She loved me and watched me grow up with much interest. She was my close friend and handled me roughly when she thought the occasion warranted it. If she did not like the way I was behaving, she told me so. If reports reached her in the kitchen about my naughty behavior in the front of the house, I heard about it from her. If she was pleased [82] with my general conduct I also heard about it. I do not think that many people in America realize or appreciate the type of friendship and relationship which can exist between the so-called upper classes and their old servants. It is a state of real friendship and deep affection on both sides.

One evening Jessie came up to see me. I had that afternoon spoken at a Gospel meeting in the little village hall and I thought I had acquitted myself exceedingly well. I was frightfully pleased with myself. Jessie had been there with the rest of the servants and, as I discovered, had listened to me quite critically and with no resultant pleasure. We were discussing the meeting when suddenly she leaned over and took me by the shoulders and shook me gently to emphasize what she had to say:

"Will you ever learn, Miss Alice, that there are twelve gates into the Holy City and everybody in the world will come in by one or other of them. They will all meet in the market-place but not everybody is going in by your gate."

I could not imagine then what she meant and she was wise enough not to say any more. I never forgot her words. She had given me one of my first lessons in breadth of vision and in the immensity of God's love and God's preparation for His people. She little knew at that time that her words would be handed down to thousands of people in my public lectures.

The next phase of the lesson was presented to me in India. I had gone to Umballa to open the Soldiers Home there and had taken with me my old personal bearer, a native called Bugaloo. I expect I have not spelt his name right, but it is of no moment. I believe he really loved me. He was an ancient gentleman with a long, white beard and he never let anyone do anything for me if he were anywhere around; looking after me with the most meticulous care, travelling everywhere with me, caring for my room and bringing me my breakfast every day. [83]

I was standing one day on the verandah of our quarters in Mumballa, looking out on the road in front of the compound and at the countless hordes and throngs of Indians - Hindus, Mohammedans, Pathans, Sikhs, Gurkas, Rajputs and the babus, sweepers, men, women and children who passed ceaselessly along the road. They plodded silently - coming from somewhere, going somewhere, thinking of something, and their name is legion. Suddenly old Bugaloo came up to me and put his hand on my arm (a thing no Indian servant ever does) and gave it a little shake to attract my attention. Then he said in his curious English,

"Missy Baba, listen. Millions of people here. Millions, all the time long before you English came. Same God loves me as loves you."

I have since often wondered who he was and have asked myself whether my Master K.H. had used him to break the shell of formalism in me. This old bearer looked and acted like a saint and probably was a disciple. Again I was faced with the same problem with which Jessie Duncan had confronted me - the problem of the love of God. What had God done about the millions of people down the ages, throughout the entire world, before Christ came? Had they all died unsaved and gone to hell? I knew the trite argument that Christ, during the three days whilst His body was in the tomb went and "preached to the spirits in prison," i.e. in hell, but that didn't seem fair. Why give them only one small chance lasting three days, after thousands of years in hell, because they happened to live before Christ came? You can see, therefore, how little by little these interior questions were thundering in my spiritual ears.

The next episode took place in Quetta. I made up my mind that it was absolutely necessary both for my peace of mind and the good of the soldiers that I give a talk on hell. In all my years as an evangelist I had never done so. [84] I had evaded the problem. I had skirted the issue. I had never come out with a definite statement that there was a hell and that I believed in it. I was not at all sure about hell. The only thing I was sure about was that I was saved and that I wouldn't be sent there. Surely, if it existed, it should be talked about particularly since God used hell so much in which to deposit so many undesirable people. So I decided to read up on hell and I made up my mind to find out more about it. I studied the subject for a month and I particularly read the works of that disagreeable theologian, Jonathan Edwards. Have you any idea how abominable some of his sermons are? They are quite atrocious and show a sadistic nature. In one place, for instance, he talks of the babies who die unbaptised and speaks of them as "little vipers," burning to a crisp in hell fire. Now that really did seem unfair to me. They had not asked to be born; they were not old enough to know anything about Jesus, why, therefore, should they be burned to a crisp for all eternity? I saturated myself with the thought of hell and, glowing with information and forgetting that nobody had ever come back from hell to tell us whether it was true or not, I stood up that afternoon on the platform before five hundred men prepared to terrify them into the courts of heaven.

It was an immense room, with long French windows opening out into the rose garden and the roses at that time were in full bloom. I spouted my piece; I declaimed vociferously; I talked and I emphasized the dire need of my audience. I was carried away with my subject; I forgot my surroundings in the thought of hell. Suddenly at the end of half an hour I discovered I had no audience. One by one they had sneaked out of the French windows. One by one they had listened until they could stand no more and they congregated among the roses to laugh at the poor [85] little fool. I was left with a small handful of religiously minded soldiers (irreverently called "Bible thumpers" by their comrades). They were members of the prayer-meeting group and silently, stolidly and politely waited for me to get through. When it was all over and I had fumbled to a feeble finish, a sergeant came up to me with a pitying look in his eye and said,

"Now, Miss, just so long as you speak the truth we will sit and listen to anything you have got to say, you know that, but the moment you start telling lies most of us will up and go. And we did."

It was a drastic and violent lesson and one which at the time I did not understand. I believed that the Bible taught the fact of hell and all my values were being shaken. If teaching about hell was untrue, what else was false?

These three episodes threw my mind into the most violent questioning and helped eventually bring about a nervous breakdown. Had I been wrong right along? Were there a few things which I still had to learn? Were there other points of view which might possibly be right? I knew there were a lot of nice people who did not think as I did and hitherto I had only been sorry for them. Was God just as I had pictured Him and, (awful thought) if God was as I had pictured Him and if I really understood God and what He wanted, could He be God at all - because (if I could understand Him) He must be as finite as I? Was there a hell and if so, why on earth did God send anyone there if it was such an unpleasant place and He was a God of love? I knew I couldn't do so. I knew I would say to people: "Well, if you cannot believe in Me that's too bad, for I'm really worth believing in, but I cannot and will not punish you just for that. Perhaps you cannot help it, perhaps you have not heard of Me or perhaps you have heard wrong things about Me." Why should I be kinder than God? Did I know more about love than God did and if [86] I did know more about love how, then, could God be God, because I would be greater than He along some lines? Did I know what I was doing? How could I go on teaching? And so on and so on. A change in my point of view and attitude began to show itself. A tiny fermentation had started which was basic in its results and agonizing in its application. I was thoroughly worried and began to sleep badly. I could not think clearly and did not dare ask anyone about it.

In 1906 I began to break down physically. The headaches to which I had always been subject increased and I was worn to a frazzle. Three things were responsible for this break. First, I was shouldering far too much responsibility for my years and, secondly, I was undergoing acute psychical disturbance. When there were catastrophies and difficulties in connection with the work, I shouldered the blame in my own mind. I had still to learn the lesson that the only true failure is being beaten and then being unable to keep on going on. But what mattered to me the most was that it seemed that the inner fabric of my life was beginning to crumble. I had staked my entire life on the words of St. Paul; "I know Whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him until that day." But I was not sure any more about there being a judgment day; I was not at all sure what it was that I had committed to Christ; I was questioning all the facts about which I had been persuaded. The only fact which I have never questioned and of which I am eternally sure is the fact of Christ Himself. I do know Whom I have believed. That fact has stood the test and is no longer on the basis of belief but of knowledge. Christ Is. He stands - "the Master of all the Masters and the Teacher alike of angels and of men."

But beyond this one unalterable fact, the whole mental [87] fabric of my life and my attitude towards the trite theology of my co-workers was shaken to the very foundation. It remained thus shaken until 1915. Unfortunately for me and giving the third reason for my physical breakdown, I fell in love, for the first time, with a gentleman ranker (as they are called) a private in an Hussar regiment. I had imagined myself in love many times. I can well remember a major in a certain regiment (now a famous general) wanting to marry me. That was a funny time. I had developed measles while at a certain Indian station and had turned up among the out-patients in a native hospital run by English doctors. Measles was diagnosed and they quarantined me in a cottage in the compound - with my bearer who slept at night across the door. I could not have had a more impeccable chaperone. Three doctors and this major spent the evening with me and I can see us now sitting around a table with an oil lamp, for it was winter time, and Dr. X with his feet on the mantelpiece reading the paper and the other doctor and major playing chess and me, in a very spotty condition, sewing diligently. The major was eventually stolen from me by a little governess which was not flattering, and one of the doctors cherished a hopeless love for me for several years. He even chased me home from India to Scotland to my horror and dismay and to the surprise of the family who could not make out why on earth he could be so devoted. There had been other interested men but never once had I been intrigued until I met Walter Evans.

He was exceedingly good looking. He had a brilliant mind and was highly educated and got soundly converted through my ministrations. Had I not been doing the work which I was doing, there would have been no problem except the financial one, but the difficulty with which I was faced was that the ladies who were working in the Sandes Soldiers [88] Home were supposed to be of such aristocratic connections (and they really were) that the possibility or the probability of marriage between them and the soldiers was simply out of the question. The well defined caste system in Great Britain aided this position. They must not and they could not and usually they would not fall in love with a man in the ranks. I was, therefore, faced not only with my own personal problem, for Walter Evans was not socially of the same standing as myself, but I was also letting down the work and making things almost impossibly difficult for my fellow workers. I was utterly frantic. I felt a traitor. My heart was pulling me in one direction and my head was saying most emphatically "No" and I was so sick and ill I found it impossible to think clearly.

How I do detest having to talk about this period in my life and how I hate raking in the dust of the next few years. I had been trained in a dignified reticence; my work in the Sandes Soldiers Homes had taught me not to talk about myself. In any case, I do not like discussing myself, particularly such happenings as my life in relation to Walter Evans. So much of my time during the past twenty years has been spent in listening to the confidences of worried and tried people. I have sat amazed at the intimate details that they have brought to me, seemingly with much enjoyment. I have never understood this relaxing of the rules of personal information - hence the difficulty I am encountering in writing this autobiography.

One hot night in Lucknow I could not sleep. I walked up and down my room and felt entirely desolate. I went out on to the broad verandah shrouded in flowering bougainvillaea but found nothing there but mosquitoes. I returned to my room and stood by my dressing table for a minute. Suddenly a broad shaft of brilliant light struck my room and the voice of the Master Who had come to me when I [89] was fifteen spoke to me. I did not see Him this time but I stood in the middle of the room and listened to what He had to say. He told me not to be unduly troubled; that I had been under observation and was doing what He wanted me to do. He told me that things were planned and that the life work which He had earlier outlined to me would start, but in a way which I would not recognize. He offered me no solution for any of my problems and He did not tell me what to do. The Masters never do. They never tell a disciple what to do or where to go, or how to handle a situation, in spite of all the bunk talked by nice, well meaning devotees. The Master is a busy executive and His job is world direction. He never runs around talking sweet platitudes to perfectly mediocre people whose influence is nil and whose power to serve is undeveloped. I mention this because this is one of the things which need debunking and which has misled a lot of very good people. We learn to be Masters by mastering our own problems, by putting right our own mistakes, by lifting some of humanity's burdens and by forgetting ourselves. The Master did not comfort me that night, He offered me no compliments or nice platitudes. He said, in effect, the work must go on. Don't forget. Be prepared to work. Don't be deceived by circumstances.

To give him his due, Walter Evans behaved exceedingly well. He appreciated the situation and did his best to keep himself in the background and make things as easy for me as he could. When the hot weather came I went up to Rhanikhet with Miss Schofield and there the whole matter between me and Walter Evans came to a show-down. It had been a hard summer there. We had opened the new Home and I had been far from well all the time. Walter Evans had come up with his regiment and (as it was a cavalry regiment) he and some other of the men undertook [90] to teach me to ride better than I did. Miss Schofield had seen what was happening. She and I were very close to each other and I was fortunate to have her for a friend at that time. She knew me well and trusted me completely. One day towards the end of the season and when the monsoons were over she told me that the Home was going to be closed in a week's time and that she was leaving me alone there to close up and this in spite of the fact that she knew Walter Evans was in the place and that I would be quite alone in the house. The day before I was to leave Ranikhet, I sent for Walter Evans and told him the whole thing was impossible, that I would never see him again and that it was good bye for once and all. He accepted my decision and I returned to the plains.

Arrived there I collapsed completely. I was worn out with over work, with constant migraine headaches of the worst kind and with the culminating matter of this love affair. I had no ability to sit light in the saddle. I never have had and this in spite of a very real sense of humor which has often saved my life. I've always taken life and circumstance very hard, and have lived a very intense thought-life. I have an idea that in a previous life I failed the Masters seriously. I have no recollection of what it was I did, but I have always had a deep feeling that this life I must never fail Him and that I must make good. How I failed in the past does not matter, but today I must not fail.

I've always been annoyed at the rubbish talked by people about "recovering their past incarnations." I am a profound skeptic where this recovery is concerned. I believe that the various books which have been published giving in detail the past lives of prominent occultists are evidences of a vivid imagination and that they are untrue and mislead the public. I have been encouraged in this belief by the fact [91] that in my work dozens of Mary Magdalenes and Julius Caesars, and other important people, have confessed portentously to me who they were; yet in this life they are such very ordinary, uninteresting people. These famous people seem to have deteriorated sadly since their last incarnations and it arouses a question as to evolution in my mind. Also, I do not believe that, in the long cycle of the soul's experience, the soul either remembers or cares what form it occupied or what it did two thousand, eight thousand or one hundred years ago any more than my present personality has the faintest recollection or interest in what I did at 3:45 p.m. on the afternoon of Nov. 17th, 1903. One single life is probably of no more importance to the soul than fifteen minutes in 1903 is of importance to me. There surely are occasional lives that stand out in the recollection of the soul, just as there are days in one's present life that are unforgettable, but they are few and far between.

I know that I am today what many, many lives of experience and bitter lessons have made me. I'm sure that the soul could - if it wanted to waste the time - recover its past incarnations, because the soul is omniscient; but of what use would it be? It would be only another form of self-centeredness. It would also be a sorry story. If I have any wisdom today and if any of us manage to avoid the grosser mistakes of life, it is because we learnt through the hardest kind of experience not to do these particular things. Our past record - from our present spiritual standpoint - is probably completely disgraceful. We've murdered in the past; we have stolen; we have defamed and been selfish; we have been corrupt in our dealings with other men; we have been lustful; we have deceived and been disloyal. But we paid the price, for the great law which St. Paul states "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap" does [92] work; it eternally works. So today we do not do these things, because we did not like the price we paid - and pay we did. I think it is about time that the silly idiots who spend so much time in an effort to recover their past incarnations wake up to the fact that if they once saw themselves as they truly were at that time they would forever keep silent. I do know that whoever I was and whatever I did in a previous life, I failed. Details are immaterial but the fear of failure is deeply ingrained and inherent in my life. Hence the pronounced inferiority complex from which I suffer, but which I try to hide for the sake of the work.

So with great determination and with a sense of inner heroism I pledged myself to a spinster's life and tried to go on with the work.

My good intentions, however, did not suffice to keep me going. I was too ill. Miss Schofield, therefore, decided to take me back to Ireland and see what Elise Sandes would suggest. I was too sick to protest and had reached the point where I did not care whether I lived or died. I had closed up the Soldiers' Home in Ranikhet and, as far as I knew, the accounts were in good order. I had tried to take the usual Gospel meetings up to the end but I have an idea that I had lost my punch. All I can remember was the tremendous kindness of a Colonel Leslie who superintended my transfer from Ranikhet down to the plains. I had to go by carriage; I had to be carried on a man's back across a raging torrent; I had to be carried on a dandy for many miles and I had again to take another coach until I arrived where I could take the train to Delhi. New Delhi was not then in existence. He arranged it all - cushions, various comforts, food and everything I could possibly require. My personal durzi or tailor determined to go with me, paying his own expenses to Bombay and [93] just because he cared about me. He and my bearer looked after me and I have never forgotten their kindness and gentle help.

When I arrived at Delhi, the station master came and told me that a private coach had been sent up for me from Bombay by the General Manager. How he knew I was ill, I do not know, but he was one of the five men I have already mentioned in connection with my first trip. I have never thanked him, but I am very grateful.

I have no recollection of the journey from India to Ireland except for two things. One was of our arrival in Bombay and going to the hotel. I remember going up to my room and lying down on my bed, too tired to unpack or even to wash. The next thing I recollect was waking up seventeen hours later to find Miss Schofield's face on one side of the bed and the doctor on the other. I have done that sleeping act once or twice in my life when I have been too run down. The second thing I remember was being taken on board the P. & 0. boat where, to my horror and my shame, from sheer weakness and nervous exhaustion, I started crying. I cried all the way from Bombay to Ireland. I cried on the boat; I cried at meals; I cried on deck; I debarked at Marseilles with the tears dripping down my face. I cried on the train to Paris. I cried in the hotel there; I cried on the train to Calais and on the boat to England. I cried ceaselessly and hopelessly and I could not stop however hard I tried. I only remember laughing twice and then I really did laugh. We got off at Avignon for a meal and went into the restaurant there. A very nervous waiter came in. He gave me one look and dropped three dozen plates one by one out of his hand - I honestly believe because I sat there weeping and weeping. The other thing that made me laugh happened at a little wayside station in France where the train stopped for ten minutes. [94] A lady in our compartment got off the train to go to the ladies' room. Trains were not as comfortable in those days as they are now and lacked all kinds of accommodation. We dignified the ladies' room by the name W.C. She came back to the train doubled up with laughter and said to me, when she could catch her breath, "My dear, as you know, I went to the Wesleyan Chapel. It was not very clean and it was very ugly but, then, you always expect Wesleyan Chapels to be very ugly. What upset me was the fact that that funny French porter stood impatiently outside the door to hand me the hymn sheets." I stopped crying for a few minutes to laugh myself sick and then Miss Schofield thought I was haying hysterics.

At last we got to Ireland and I was with my beloved Miss Sandes. I can remember the relief I felt and the feeling that now all my troubles were over. At least, she would understand the situation and appreciate what I had done. To my complete astonishment, I discovered that all my gallant sacrifice was regarded by her as an absolutely unnecessary gesture. She interpreted me, and perhaps rightly, as a bewildered infant taking refuge in dramatics. She was, of course, deeply disappointed in me. I had done the one thing which her girls never did. She had banked on my help for years to come and had even taken steps to make me, young as I was, a trustee of her work. She felt I could carry on because, as she told me, she liked my sense of humor, she recognized my basic integrity and what she called my "spiritual poise" and she knew I was essentially truthful. In fact, she told me once, walking up a country lane in Ireland, that my truthfulness was very apt to get me into trouble and that I had better learn that it was not always necessary to state the truth boldly. Silence could sometimes be helpful.

I had, therefore, from my point of view let the whole [95] work down, including Miss Sandes. By now I had begun to stop crying and was contented to be with her. I can see the sitting-room now in the boarding-house at the little seaside town near Dublin where she bad met Theo Schofield and me. She bad heard Theo's story and Theo loved me. She had heard my story - the story of a bewildered, martyred saint; at least that is how I then regarded myself. She sent me to bed that night and told me that she would see me the next morning. After breakfast she told me that she saw no real reason why, if I wanted to get married, I should not get married, provided the whole matter was handled with discretion. The situation required what that ancient scripture of India, The Bhagavad Gita, calls "skill in action." She loved me and petted me and told me not to worry. I was too tired to care much in any case and certainly too tired to have any ideas as to skill in action. I was aghast, and realized that my marvellous, heroic, spiritual sacrifice for the sake of the work was being regarded as quite unnecessary. I felt let down. I faced a major anticlimax. I worked myself up during the day into a terrible state; I felt a fool or an idiot. Then I left these two beloved, elderly ladies discussing me and my plans and went out into the cool night air to walk. I was so fed up, so discouraged, so utterly sick at heart that the next thing I remember was being picked up by a policeman. He set me on my feet and shook me (people always seemed to be shaking me) and looking at me with the deepest suspicion, he said, "Don't you go around fainting in places like this. It is nine o'clock at night and it is lucky I saw you. Now you go on home." I crept back cold and soaked to the skin with the rain and spray from the sea which swept the pier where I had apparently been lying for quite a time. I blubbered out my story to Elise and Theo and was then lovingly tucked into bed. I think I gained a certain sense of proportion and also the [96] knowledge how tragic life happenings are to the young, and how over emphasis is a natural reaction of youth.

The next day I went to Edinburgh to my beloved aunt, Margaret Maxwell. There my problems became more complicated, not only by her solicitude but by the arrival of a very charming and delightful man who had followed me all the way from India to ask me to marry him. On top of that complication came another. I got a letter the following morning from an army officer, telling me that he was in London and would I please consider marrying him at once. So there I was, with a solicitous aunt, two extremely anxious co-workers and three men on my hands. I could talk to my aunt about Walter Evans and this I did, frankly putting up the situation to her. I did not dare mention the other two men because, with her conservative attitude, she would have felt that there was something seriously wrong with me if I had encouraged all three men at once - which I had not. To give me my due, I was never a flirt.

I had only one week in Edinburgh before leaving for London, owing to the fact that my return passage to Bombay had been booked before I ever left India. My problem was: to whom could I go for advice? That I could answer easily. I went around to the Deaconess' House in Edinburgh to see the head of the Church of Scotland deaconesses. She was a sister of Sir William Maxwell of Cardoness Castle and sister-in-law of the aunt with whom I was stopping. To me she was always "Aunt Alice" and I adored her for there was no narrowness or stupidity in her. I can see her now - tall and straight in her brown deaconess' uniform, getting up to welcome me in her lovely sitting-room. Her uniforms were made of heavily corded brown silk and she usually wore real lace collars and cuffs which I had made for her. I was an exceedingly good lace maker. I had learned to make Irish Carrickmacross needle-point lace [97] when quite a young girl and it was really beautiful. For several years I had made her collars and cuffs in gratitude for the fact she had always understood me. She had never married but she knew life and she loved people. I told her the story of Walter Evans, about the Major in London and about the silly, wealthy idiot who had followed me home and was even then standing outside the house. I can see her now going over to the window and peeking at him through the lace curtain and laughing. We talked for two hours and she told me to leave the matter to her, that she would think over and pray over what I should do. She told me she would do what she rightly could to straighten out my problem as I was too ill to have any judgment or common sense left. I relaxed under her skillful handling and went back to my aunt feeling better. In a few days' time I went down to London and took the boat again for India accompanied by Gertrude Davies-Colley who undertook to stay with me and take care of me as I was obviously too ill to be left alone.

So I went back to my job and did it, having no faintest idea how my life would work out; making up my mind to live one day at a time and not to look ahead into the future. I had confidence in the Lord and in my friends and so I just waited.

In the meantime "Aunt Alice" got in touch with Walter Evans. His time in the army was nearly up and he was booked to leave India. She paid all his expenses to go to the United States and there to take a theological course and so become a clergyman of the Episcopal Church, the American equivalent of the Church of England. This she did to give him a social standing which would make it easier for me eventually to marry him. She did the whole thing in an absolutely open manner, keeping me informed of every step she took and letting Miss Sandes know also what she [98] was doing. The whole matter, however, was kept exceedingly quiet as regards me and my work in the army and (when eventually I left India to be married) it was understood that I was returning to marry a clergyman.

I went back to Umballa and carried through the work there all through that winter and then in the summer I went up to Chakrata to run the Soldiers' Home there. My health was steadily getting worse and the migraine headaches more frequent. The work was very heavy and I remember with gratitude the goodness and the kindness of two men who did so much for me and I often wonder if I would be alive today had it not been for them. One of them was Colonel Leslie, whose daughters were my friends and contemporaries. I went much to his home and he looked after me in a very beautiful way. The other was Colonel Swan who was a P.M.O. of the army in that district and to whom I went as a physician. He did all that he could for me, sitting up sometimes for hours looking after me, but I got so ill that the two men eventually took matters into their own bands, and cabled to my people and Miss Sandes that they were sending me back to England on the next boat.

When I got back to London I went to see Sir Alfred Schofield, brother of Theo Schofield, and at that time one of the leading neurologists and physicians in London. I put myself into his hands. He was a brilliant man and really understood me. I went to him terrified over my headaches. I had an idea that I had a tumor on the brain, or was going insane or something equally silly and I was too physically ill to combat those phobias successfully. After talking to me for a little while he got up from his desk and strolled over to the bookcase from which he took a large and ponderous tome. Opening it he pointed to a certain paragraph and said, "Young lady, read those four or five lines and get [99] rid of your fears." I read that migraine was never fatal; had no effect upon the mentality of the subject and the victims were usually people of good mental balance and brain power. He was wise enough to read my unspoken fears and I mention this here for the benefit of other sufferers. He then sent me to bed for six months and told me to sew all the time. So I went up to Castramont to my Aunt Margaret, back to the old bedroom that I had occupied for so many years and proceeded to make my sister an outfit of underwear - ruffled petticoats all feather-stitched and hemstitched and lace edged; panties with ruffles (which we never mentioned those days) and corset-covers, never seen today and as obsolete as the Dodo. One thing I will say for myself, I was a beautiful needlewoman. Each day I got up and went for walks upon the moors and each week saw me getting slightly better. Every few days brought me letters from Walter Evans from whom I had heard quite regularly ever since he had gone to America. [100]

Chapter III

It is very difficult to write about the next few years or to know just how to handle the next phase in my life. Looking back, I am conscious of the fact that my sense of humor temporarily failed me, and when that happens to someone who can usually laugh at life and circumstances it is rather terrible. When I say "humor" I don't think I mean a sense of fun but an ability to laugh at oneself and events and circumstances as they are seen in relation to one's setting and equipment. I don't think I have a real sense of fun; I simply do not understand the "Comics" in the Sunday papers and I can never remember a joke; but I have a sense of humor and have absolutely no difficulty in making an audience - large or small - roar with laughter. I can always laugh at myself, too. But for the next few years of my life I found nothing amusing and my problem is how to cover this cycle without being either deadly dull, or presenting a woeful picture of a miserable woman. For that was what I was. I shall just have to get ahead and tell my story with its sorrows and pain and distress as best I can, asking you to be patient. It was just an interlude between twenty-eight happy years and another twenty-eight happy years - years which are still going happily along.

Up to 1907 I had had my troubles and worries but they were basically superficial. I was doing work that I loved and I was successful at it. I was surrounded by people who liked and appreciated me and, as far as I know, I had had absolutely no problems between myself and my co-workers. I did not know what it was to want financially for anything. I could travel where I wished in India and go back to Great Britain when I wanted without a single [101] thought. I really had had no personal difficulties to face.

But we now come to a cycle of seven years in my life during which I knew nothing but trouble that left no part of my nature unaffected. I was entering a period of great mental distress; I was to be faced with situations that exacted the last atom of emotional reaction of which I am capable and, physically, life became exceedingly hard. I believe these periods are necessary in the lives of all active disciples. They are hard to take but as they are, I am firmly convinced, entered into with the full knowledge and determination of the soul, the strength to master circumstance is inevitably present. The result then is always (in my case and in the case of all who endeavor to work spiritually) a greater capacity to meet human need, and to be "a strong hand in the dark" to other fellow pilgrims. I have stood by one of my daughters as she went through a terrible experience, and I watched her - as a result of five years patient endurance - come through to a measure of usefulness that would otherwise be impossible, and she is still young, with a useful and constructive future ahead of her. I could not have done this had I not been through the fire myself.

When the six months on my back were over, arrangements were made for my marriage. What little money I had was legally arranged in a trust that Walter Evans could not touch, had he wanted to. "Aunt Alice" sent him the money to outfit himself and come to Scotland to fetch me. I was then living with my aunt, Mrs. Maxwell, of Castramont. I was married in a private chapel of a friend's house by a Mr. Boyd-Carpenter. My father's eldest brother, William La Trobe-Bateman (also a clergyman) gave me away.

I went immediately after the wedding to stop with Walter Evan's people in the north of England. A connection [102] of mine by marriage who was at the wedding and who is related to half of England took me aside when I said good bye and said,

"Now, Alice, you've married this man and you are going from here to visit his people. You will not find that they are your people and it will be your duty to make them feel that you believe they are. For Heaven's sake, don't be a snob."

With these words, she ushered me into a period of my life in which I left caste and social position behind and suddenly discovered humanity.

I am not one of the people who believe that only the proletarian are good and right and that the middle classes are the salt of the earth, whilst the aristocracy are absolutely useless and should be gotten rid of. Neither do I accept the position that only the intelligentsia can save the world, though that is a sounder position because the intelligentsia can come out of all classes. I have met frightful snobs from the so-called lower classes. I've met them, also, of an equally virulent kind among the aristocracy. The prudery and the conservatism of the middle classes is a great balancing force in any nation. The push and the rebellion of the lower classes promotes the growth of a people, whilst the tradition, culture and noblesse oblige of the aristocracy is a great asset to the nation that possesses it. All these factors have a right and sound usefulness but all can be equally well misused. Conservatism can be dangerously reactionary; a right rebellion can turn into a fanatical revolution, and a sense of responsibility and superiority frequently evidenced by the "upper classes" can degenerate into a stupifying paternalism. There is no nation without its class distinctions. There may be an aristocracy of birth in Great Britain but in the United States there is an aristocracy of money equally as distinctive, exclusive, and rigid in its barriers. Who shall settle the quarrel, which is best [103] or which worst? I had been brought up in a very rigid caste system and nothing in my life had tended to throw me on equal terms with those not of my own caste. I had yet to discover that behind all the class distinctions of the Occident and the caste systems of the Orient there is a great entity which we called Humanity.

Anyway, with my beautiful clothes, my lovely jewelry, my cultured voice and my social manner, I launched myself unthinkingly and without any appreciation of the situation into Walter Evans' family. Even the old family servants were distrustful of the situation. The old coachman, Potter, drove Walter Evans and me to the station after the wedding. I can see him now in his livery, with a cockade in his hat. He had known me ever since I was a little bit of a girt and when we got to the station, he got down and took my hand and said,

"Miss Alice, I don't like him and I don't like to say this to you, but if he doesn't treat you right - you come right back to us. Just drop me a line and I'll meet you at the station."

Then he drove off without another word. The station master of the little Scotch station had reserved a carriage for us as far as Carlisle. As he put me into the carriage he looked me in the eye and said,

"He isn't what I would have chosen for you, Miss Alice, but I hope you will be happy."

None of this left the slightest impression on me. I have an idea now that I left behind me a group of very worried relatives, friends and servants. But I was quite oblivious of it then. I had done what I believed to be right and done it at a sacrifice and was now reaping my reward. The past lay behind me. My work with the soldiers was finished. Ahead of me lay a wonderful future with the man I thought I adored, in a new and wonderful land, for we were on our way to America.

Before going to Liverpool we stopped with my husband's people and I never put in a more dreadful time. They [104] were nice, kind, good and worthy, but I had never before eaten with people of that caliber, or slept in a house of that kind, or eaten my meals in a "parlour" or lived in a house with no servants. I was terrified of them and they were more terrified of me, though kind of proud that Walter had done so well for himself. In justice to Walter Evans, I think that I should say that after we had separated and he had gone to one of our great universities for a postgraduate course, I received a letter from the president of the university begging me to return to Walter. He pleaded with me (as a very old and experienced man) to go back to my husband because, he stated, never in the course of his long experience with thousands of young men had he met a man as gifted - spiritually, physically and mentally - as Walter Evans. It was not surprising, therefore, that I had fallen in love and married him. All the indications were good except his social setting and lack of money, but as I was going to America to live and as he was shortly to be ordained in the Episcopal Church that did not seem to matter. We could manage on his stipend and my small income.

We went straight from England to Cincinnati, Ohio, where my husband was studying at the Lane Theological Seminary. I immediately set in and took his various courses with him, whilst the money which I had supported both of us and paid all expenses. I found when it came down to the details of married life that I had absolutely nothing in common with my husband, except on religious views. He knew nothing really of my background and I knew less of his. We both tried at this time to make a success of our marriage, but it was a failure. I think I would have died of misery and despair had it not been for the colored woman who ran the boarding-house, connected with the seminary, on the top floor of which we had one room. Her name was Mrs. Snyder and she adopted me on sight. She nursed me [105] and petted me and took care of me; she scolded me and she fought for me and, for some reason, she hated the sight of Walter Evans and took pleasure in telling him so. She saw to it that I had the best that it was in her power to provide. I loved her and she was my one confidante.

It was then, for the first time in my life, I came up against the racial problem. I had no anti-Negro feeling, except that I did not believe in marriage between the colored races and the white for it never seemed to work for happiness on either side. I was appalled to discover that under the American constitution we stood for equality for all men but that (through the poll tax and poor education) we most carefully saw to it that the Negro was not equal. Things are better in the North than in the South but the Negro problem is one that the American people will have to solve. The Constitution has already solved it for them. I remember at Lane Theological Seminary a Negro professor, a Doctor Franklin, had been invited to give the alumni address. After we came out of the chapel, I was standing with my husband and a couple of professors talking about the beautiful address we had had when Dr. Franklin passed by. One of the professors stopped him and handed him money to go and buy his lunch. He was not even good enough to eat with all the rest of us, though he could speak to us on the spiritual values. I was so horrified that, with my usual impetuosity, I rushed off to a professor and his wife whom I knew and told them about it. They immediately came back with me and took Dr. Franklin to their own home for lunch. The discovery of the anti-Negro feeling was like discovering an open door into the great house of humanity. Here was a whole section of my fellowmen who were being refused the rights of the Constitution under which they had been born.

Since then I have thought and read and talked about this [106] problem of the minorities. I have many Negro friends and I think I may claim that we understand each other. I have found Negroes as cultural and as fastidious and as sound in their thinking as many of my white friends. I have discussed the problem with them and I know that all they ask is equality of opportunity, of education, of work and living conditions. I have never met one who was demanding social equality, though the time is coming when they must and will have it. I have found that the attitude of the cultured and educated Negro towards the undeveloped members of their race is reasonable and sound, and as a prominent Negro lawyer said to me once: "Most of us are children, particularly in the South, and need loving and developing like children."

A few years ago in London I had a letter from a scientist, a Dr. Just, asking me if I would grant him an interview as he had read some things I had written and wished to talk to me. I invited him to lunch at my club and when he arrived I found he was a Negro and a very black Negro at that. He was a charming and interesting gentleman and was on his way back to Washington after lecturing at Berlin University. He was one of the leading biologists of the world. My husband and I took him down to our house in Tunbridge Wells for a couple of nights and we greatly enjoyed his visit. One of my daughters asked him if he was married. I well remember his turning to her and saying: "My dear young lady, I would never dream of asking a girl of your race to marry me and to suffer the inevitable ostracism, and I have not yet met a girl of my own race who could give me the mental companionship I wanted. No, I have never married." He has since died and I regret it much; I had hoped for a closer friendship with a very fine man.

Increasingly, during my thirty-six years' residence in this [107] country, I have been shocked, amazed and frightened by the attitude of many Americans to their fellow-Americans, the Negro minority. The problem will have to be solved and room made for the Negro in the national life. They cannot be kept down, nor should they be. It is up to them to prove themselves all that they claim to be and it is up to all of us to see that they do, and that the abominable utterances and the poisonous hatred of such a man as Senator Bilbo are stifled, and there are a number such as he. Again I restate my belief that the problem cannot be solved today (I make no prophecy about the future) by intermarriage. It must be solved by fearless justice, the recognition of the fact that all men are brothers and that if the Negro is a problem it is our fault. If he is uneducated and not properly trained in the technique of citizenship it is again our fault. It is time that prominent white men and congressmen in both Houses and parties left off yelling for democracy and free elections in the Balkans and elsewhere and applied the same principles to their own southern States. Forgive this tirade, but I feel strongly on the matter, as you see.

This colored woman, Mrs. Snyder, mothered me for months and looked after me until my eldest girl was born, sending for her own doctor, who was not colored but not a particularly good doctor, so I did not get the skilled care I should have had. That was not her fault as she did her best to see me through. I have been curiously unlucky when my three children were born, and only once had a hospital nurse with me. Anyway, when my first child was born I had inexpert care. Walter Evans went into hysterics all the time, demanding most of the attention of the doctor, but Mrs. Snyder was like a tower of strength and I shall never forget her. Later the doctor sent in a practical nurse but she was so incompetent that I suffered severely at her [108] hands and went through three months of great discomfort and agony.

We then moved from the seminary to other living quarters. We took a small apartment where, for the first time, I was left alone with a small baby and all the housework to do. Up to that time I had never washed a pocket handkerchief, boiled an egg or made a cup of tea, and was a completely incompetent young woman. My experience in learning to do things was such that I have seen to it that the three girls know all there is to know about housekeeping. They are entirely competent. I'm quite sure it was not an easy time for Walter Evans and it was then that I began to discover - living alone with him where we could not be overheard - that he was developing an appalling temper.

My Waterloo was the weekly washing. I used to go down to the basement, which was fitted with the usual stationary tubs, and do the washing. I had brought all my own baby clothes with me, of very great beauty, yards long, beautiful flannels, real lace insertion, almost priceless - a dozen of everything and what I did to those clothes was a sorrow and a pain. When I was through washing them, they looked most peculiar. One morning, I heard a knock on my door and on opening it I found a woman who lived in the flat below me. She looked at me with distress and said, "See here, Mrs. Evans, it's Monday morning and I can't stand it any longer. I'm an English servant and you are an English lady and I've got sense enough to know it. There are things I know and things you don't, and you're coming down with me every Monday morning until I say you needn't and I'll teach you how to launder clothes." She said it as if she had learnt it off by heart and she was as good as her word. Today there is nothing about laundry work that I don't know and I owe it all to Mrs. Schubert. Here is another instance of somebody for whom I had [109] done nothing but who was just straight human and kind and I got another peek into the house of humanity. She and I became real friends and she used to champion me when Walter Evans was in a rage. Time and again I have taken refuge in her small apartment. I wonder whether she and Mrs. Snyder are alive. I fancy not; they would be too old.

When Dorothy was about six months old I went back to Great Britain to see my people, leaving my husband to finish his theological training and get ordained. This was my last visit to England for twenty years, and I have no particularly happy recollections of it. I could not tell them I was not happy and had made a mistake. My pride would not let me, but they undoubtedly guessed it though they asked no questions. My sister was married whilst I was there to my cousin, Laurence Parsons. We had the usual family gathering at an uncle's house. I only stayed a few months in England and then went back to America. In the meantime my husband had graduated from the seminary, been ordained and been given a charge under the Bishop of San Joaquin in California. This turned out to be a wonderful thing for me, for the Bishop and his wife became my true friends. I still hear from her. My youngest daughter is named after her and she is one of the people whom I dearly love, but I will tell you more about her later.

I came back to the States on a small boat which docked in Boston. It was quite the most awful voyage I ever took - a small, dirty boat, four in a cabin, and meals at long tables where the men kept their hats on. I recollect it as a nightmare. But, like all bad things, it ended and we arrived at Boston in the pouring rain and I was quite desperate. I had a bad headache; my dressing-case with all its massive silver fittings which had been my mother's had been stolen and Dorothy, being about a year old, was very heavy to carry. I was travelling on a Cook's Tourist ticket [110] and their agent was on board. He took me to the railroad station where I had to wait till midnight and after telling me what I ought to know and giving me a cup of strong coffee he left me. Wearily I sat all day in the station, trying to keep a restless baby quiet. As the time for the train arrived I wondered how I was to manage when suddenly I looked up and saw Cook's Agent, out of uniform, standing beside me. "You worried me this morning and all day," he said, "and I decided I had better put you on the train myself." Whereupon he took the baby, called a porter and established me as comfortably as possible on the train for California. The tourist sleepers in those days were not as comfortable as they are today. Again I received kindness which I did not deserve from some one for whom I had done nothing. Please do not think I am implying that there was something so charming and nice about me that people naturally helped me. I have an idea that I was not a bit charming. I was rather " 'igh and 'aughty," very reticent, almost to the point of dumbness, and frightfully British. No, it was not that but simply that average human beings are kindly inside and like to help. Don't forget that the proving of that is one of my purposes in writing. I am not manufacturing instances but relating factual happenings.

My husband was, first of all, rector of a little church in R... and it was there that I learned the duties of a clergyman's wife, the endless calls upon her time. I was introduced to the strictly feminine aspect of congregations. I had to attend the Ladies' Aid. I had to hold Mothers' Meetings and I always had to go to church and, ceaselessly and endlessly, I had to listen to Walter's sermons. Like all ministers and their families in those missionary districts, we lived largely on chicken and I learnt [111] why the chicken is a holy fowl - because so many of them enter the ministry.

This period marked another phase in the expansion of my consciousness. I had never in my whole life come across a community like this little town. There were only about fifteen hundred people in the place, but there were eleven churches, each of them with the tiniest congregation. Among the outlying ranchers were men and women who were cultured and had traveled and read and I sometimes met them. But the bulk of the people were small trades people, people connected with the railroad, plumbers, workers in the vineyards or the fruit orchards and school teachers. The rectory was a small, six-room bungalow between two larger houses, one of which housed twelve children and their parents and I lived in a constant riot of children's voices. The little town was typical - shops with false fronts, hitching posts where surreys and buggies tied up (for automobiles were still a scarcity) and the village post-office from which all the gossip and talk emanated. The climate is really lovely, though very hot and dry in the summer. However, I felt completely isolated, culturally and mentally and spiritually. It seemed to me that there was no one for me to talk to. No one had seen anything or read anything and their sole topic of conversation seemed to rotate around children, crops, food and local gossip. For months I stuck my snooty little nose up in the air and decided there was nobody good enough for me to associate with. Of course, I did my duty as the rector's wife and I am sure I was very nice and kind, but always I felt a barrier. I did not want to have much to do with the parishioners and I let them know it.

I started a Bible class, however, and that was a huge success. Numerically it outnumbered my husband's Sunday morning congregation, which may have added to the trouble [112] which was steadily growing worse. Members of all the different churches, except the Catholic, attended and it was the one bright spot in the week, partly I think because it linked me with the past.

My husband's temper was getting out of all bounds and I lived in a constant terror that the members of the congregation would discover it, and that he would lose his post. As a clergyman, he was greatly liked and was an impressive figure in his surplice and stole. He was a very good preacher. I honestly do not think I was too much to blame. I still ran my life on the aphorism "What would Jesus have me do?" I was not a cross person or quick on the trigger but I expect my silence and attempted patience was aggravating. Nothing, however, that I could manage to do would please him and after destroying all photographs and books which he thought I might value, he had taken to knocking me about, though he never touched Dorothy. He was always lovely to children.

My daughter Mildred was born in August 1912 and it was then I really woke up to the astounding fact that it was not the people of the place who were wrong but that it was I. I had been so occupied with the problems of Alice La Trobe-Bateman, who had made what seemed to be an unfortunate marriage, that I had forgotten to be Alice Evans, a human being. When Mildred was born I was very ill and it was then that I discovered the people of this little town. Mildred was ten days overdue; the temperature was 112 degrees on my porch; the twelve children next door were terribly noisy; I had been very ill for days; and then the cesspool fell in. I pictured Dorothy, who was then two and a half, trotting about and falling into the cesspool. Walter was no help. He just disappeared about his parochial duties. I had a good little Jewish nurse who was getting frightened about me and kept phoning [113] for the doctor who delayed coming. The door suddenly opened and, without knocking, the saloon keeper's wife walked in. She gave me one look and then strode over to the telephone and from house to house chased the doctor until she caught him and ordered him to come at once. She then tucked Dorothy under her arm, nodded to me, assured me that Dorothy would be quite all right with her and disappeared. I did not see Dorothy for three days. I did not much care; I was far too ill. Mildred was an instrument baby and I had two serious hemorrhages. Thanks to good nursing I pulled through. Word had gone around as to my predicament and so many good things were sent in and so many kind things were done that I remain eternally grateful. Custards, pie, port wine, fresh fruit poured in. Women turned up in the morning to do my washing, to dust, to sweep, to sit with me and to sew and mend. They relieved the nurse in looking after me. They invited my husband to their homes so he was not under foot, and I suddenly woke up to the fact that the world was full of lovely people and that I had been blind all my life. I had moved further into the house of humanity.

It was at this time, however, that the real trouble started. People began to find out what Walter Evans really was. I was up on the ninth day after Mildred's birth, without any nurse or help of any kind. The church warden's wife discovered me that day, to her horror, doing the washing, and knowing that I had nearly died ten days before, she sought out Walter Evans and read him the riot act. It did not do any good but it made her suspicious and she began to watch me more closely and to befriend me still more. His tempers were assuming serious proportions but the curious thing about him was that (beyond a savage, ungovernable temper) he had no vices of any kind whatsoever. He never drank; he never swore; he never gambled. [114] I was the only woman in whom he was ever interested and the only woman he had ever kissed, and I believe this held true until he died a few years ago. In spite of all this, he was quite impossible to live with and eventually it became dangerous to be in the same house with him. The church warden's wife came in one day and found my face badly bruised. I was so ill and tired and she was so kind and good that I admitted to her that my husband had thrown a pound of cheese at me and that it had hit me full in the face. She went back home and shortly the Bishop came down. I wish I could convey in these pages the kindness, goodness and understanding of Bishop Sanford. The first time I had met him he had come down for a confirmation. I had served supper and was in the kitchen washing dishes afterwards. Suddenly, I heard someone drying the dishes behind me and for a moment I did not turn around, thinking that it was just one of the church women. To my amazement I discovered it was the Bishop and this act was just like him. Much discussion and talk followed and eventually Walter was offered another opportunity to make good. We moved immediately to another parish. This greatly pleased me because the rectory was much nicer. It was a larger community and I was closer to Ellison Sanford, one of the loveliest people and truest friends I have ever had.

My general health got better and, in spite of the constant outbursts of fury, life was beginning to take on a little bit more color. I was closer to the city in which the Bishop and his wife lived and saw more of them. I found more people in the parish who talked my language, but it was a bad time in many ways and in the late fall I began to be ill again. My youngest girl, Ellison, was due in January and in one of his fits of temper my husband threw me down the stairs with, it turned out, a bad effect upon the child. She was very delicate after birth, being what is [115] colloquially called "a blue baby" with a leaking heart valve, and for years it was never believed that I could raise her. But I did and she is now quite the strongest of the three girls.

After this things went from bad to worse. Everybody knew that things were all wrong at the rectory and everybody did what they could to be helpful. A very nice girl offered to come and live with me as a paying guest in order that I might have someone in the home but in due time she got scared though she stayed with me right through. The field next the rectory was constantly plowed, day after day, and when (from curiosity) I asked a man who was plowing it why it was being done so constantly, he told me that a group of men had decided that I ought to have somebody within call so they took turns in plowing the field. The girls at the telephone exchange discovered the situation and made a practice of calling me up at intervals to find out if I was all right. The doctor who had taken care of me when Ellison was born was very greatly concerned and made me promise every night to hide the carving knife and axe under my mattress. The feeling was getting abroad that Walter Evans was not sane. I remember one night waking up and hearing a man go rapidly out of my room and down stairs. It was just the doctor who had looked in to see if I was all right. So again, you will see kindness surrounded me. I was, however, deeply humiliated and my pride was very sorely wounded.

One morning a friend called me up and asked me to bring the three children over for the day, saying that she would fetch me. I went and we all had a very good time. When I got back, however, I found Walter Evans had been sent to San Francisco and put under observation by a physician and psychiatrist there in order to find out whether be was mentally right or not. Fortunately for me, the doctor [116] decided he was bad and not mad and that he was suffering from nothing worse than a completely uncontrolled temper. In the meantime, Ellison had been taken frightfully ill with "cholera infantum" and no hope was held out for her recovery. I remember so well a blazing hot summer's day, during that dreadful time. Ellison was lying dangerously ill on a quilt on the floor whilst the other two children were playing in a neighbor's yard. My doctor drove up and came into the house with a baby in his arms, followed by a tall, pretty woman looking fit to be in a hospital. He said he had brought the baby for me to care for and would I put the mother to bed and take care of her too? Of course I did, and for three days I had two sick babies on my hands and a sick woman - too sick, ill and depressed to be able to care for her child. I did all I could, but the baby died in my arms. Nothing could save her, and she had expert skill on the doctor's part and I am a good nurse. That doctor was a wise man; he knew that I had all I could handle in my own home situation but needed to learn that I was not alone in trouble, that other people had as bad troubles as I, and that I was capable of a much greater expenditure of energy than I believed. The wisdom and profound psychological knowledge of the small town general practitioner is to me completely amazing. They know people; they live lives of sacrifice; they are skilled from vast experience; they handle emergencies swiftly and adequately, for they have no one to rely on but themselves. Personally, I am deeply indebted to the doctors - in cities and villages - who have been my friends as well as my physicians.

I was advised to take Ellison after this up to San Francisco to the Children's Hospital and see if something could be done. Ellison Sanford took the two other children, in spite of the fact she had four of her own, and I went north [117] with the baby. The doctors at the hospital told me that she could not possibly live, and there I had to leave her and go back to look after the other two children. I will not enlarge upon the difficulty of that episode. Those who have children will understand. I never expected to see her again, but miraculously, she did recover and was brought back to me by her father who had also been dismissed from observation with a clean bill of health. There is nothing humorous in any of this, is there? and I don't feel hilarious talking about it.

A most peculiar and difficult year now confronted us. It was impossible for the Bishop to give Walter Evans a charge. The only funds we had were largely exhausted, and my very small income, owing to the world war, was now but a trickle of money. When Walter had gone to San Francisco I was left with three children and lots of bills. He had no sense of money; cash that I might give him, or that was part of his stipend to be spent on current bills, would be spent by him on non-essential luxuries. He would leave the home to pay the monthly grocer's bill and return with a gramophone.

I shall never forget as long as I live the extraordinary kindness of the man who owned the grocery store in the little town where I was living and where Walter Evans had his last charge in the San Joaquin diocese. We owed a couple of hundred dollars on our grocery bill, though I was quite unaware of the fact. Word, of course, had gone around the village of everything that had happened. The morning after my husband had been sent away to San Francisco, the telephone rang and it was the grocery store. The owner was a Jew and a very ordinary looking Jew. I had never done anything for him except be courteous and, being British, had made it evident that I had no anti-Jew feeling. There has never been any anti-Semitic attitude in Great [118] Britain, particularly in my youth there. Some of our greatest men have been Jews, such as Lord Reading, Viceroy of India, and others. This man asked me over the phone for my order. I asked him how much we owed him and he said, "Over two hundred dollars" but that he was not worrying as he knew it would be paid even if it took five years. Then he added, "If you don't send in an order I shall have to send up what I think you need and you wouldn't like that, would you?" So I turned in an order. When the groceries arrived at the rectory that morning I found an envelope with ten dollars "incidental cash" in it which he had sent up, in case I was short of ready money, and which he had added to the bill as he knew I would not accept charity. He also asked for the key to our mail-box, so he could look after my mail for me. I have felt and still feel deeply indebted to him. It took me over two years to pay off his bill but it was paid, and each time I sent him five dollars on account I would get back a grateful letter from him just as if I had done him a favor.

Apart from the fact that I had been brought up in England where no anti-Jew feeling has prevailed and where the problem of the Negro is better understood than in the United States, I have been deeply indebted to members of these two suffering minorities. The problem of the Negro has always seemed to me simpler than that of the Jew, and one that can be much more easily solved.

The Jewish problem has seemed to me well nigh insoluble. I, at this time see no way out, except through the slow process of evolution and a planned educational campaign. I have no anti-Jewish feeling; some of my most beloved friends such as Dr. Assagioli, Regina Keller and Victor Fox I love devotedly, and they know it. There are few people in the world as close to me as they are, and I depend upon them for counsel and understanding and they [119] do not fail me. I have been officially on Hitler's "blacklist" because of my defense of the Jews whilst lecturing up and down western Europe. In spite, however, of knowing full well the wonderful qualities of the Jew, his contribution to western culture and learning and his wonderful assets and gifts along the line of the creative arts I still fail to see any immediate solution of their crucial and appalling problem.

There are faults on both sides. I do not here refer to the faults or rather the evil criminality of the Germans or the Poles towards their Jewish citizens. I refer to all those people who are for the Jews and not against them. We Gentiles have not yet found out what to do in order to liberate the Jews from persecution - a persecution that is many, many centuries old. The Egyptians in the early phases of Biblical history persecuted the Jews, and persecution has been their record down the years. I hesitate to state my conclusions but am going to do so in the hope that it may help. It is only possible however very briefly to bear on one or two points, and from the start it must be necessarily inadequate.

There must be some basic cause for this constant and ceaseless persecution, some reason why they are not liked. What can it be? The basic cause probably lies deeply rooted in certain racial characteristics. People complain (and it is frequently true) that the Jews lower the atmosphere of any district in which they reside. They hang their bedding and their clothing out of the windows. They live on the streets, sitting in groups on the sidewalks. But for centuries the Jews were tent dwellers and had to live this way and may still react to hereditary qualities. The complaint is made that the moment you permit a Jew to get a footing in your group or business organization, it will not be long before his sisters and his nephews, his uncles and his aunts [120] are in it too. But the Jews have had to hang together in the face of centuries of persecution. It is claimed that the Jew is strictly material, that the all-mighty dollar matters more to him than the ethical values and that he is quick and expert in taking advantage of the Gentiles. But the Jewish religion lays no emphasis upon immortality or upon the life after death, and this is true because I have discussed this problem with Jewish theological students. Why, therefore, should they not get the best out of life along material lines? Let us eat and drink and get worldly goods for tomorrow we die. All this is understandable but does not make for good relations.

As I have studied and thought and asked questions, certain things have clarified in my mind and are - for me - part of the answer. The Jews hang on to a religion which is basically obsolete. I asked myself a few days ago what part of the Old Testament was worth preserving. Much of it is dreadful, cruel and only because the literature is found in the Bible does it pass the post-office regulations. I decided that the ten commandments must be preserved, one or two of the Bible stories such as the love of David and Jonathan, the 23rd Psalm and the 91st Psalm with a few others and about four chapters in the Book of Isaiah. All the rest was largely useless or undesirable, and much that was left fed the pride and nationalism of the people. That which stands between the orthodox Jew and the mass of the Gentiles are his religious taboos, for the Jewish faith is largely a religion of "Thou shalt not." That which conditions Gentile thinking concerning the unorthodox and younger Jew is his materialism, of which Shylock is a symbol.

As I write these words I am conscious of their inadequacy and lack of complete fairness and yet from the standpoint of a broad generalization, they, are absolutely true - although [121] from the standpoint of an individual Jew they are in many, many cases grossly unfair. There is much in the Jew and the German which is alike. The German regards himself as a member of the "super race" whilst the orthodox Jew regards himself as the Chosen People. The German emphasizes "racial purity" and so have the Jews down the ages. The Jew never seems assimilable. I have met Jews in Asia, in India and in Europe as well as here and they remain Jews, and in spite of their citizenship they are separate from the nation in which they dwell. I have not found it so in Great Britain or in Holland.

The Gentiles have frequently treated the Jews abominably, and many of us are heartsick about it and working hard to help. One handicap comes today from the Jews themselves. Personally, I have never yet found a Jew who would admit that there might be faults or provocation on their side. They always take the position that they are the abused and that the whole problem could be solved by the Christian taking right action. Lots of us, thousands of us are trying to take right action but we get no cooperation from the Jews.

Forgive this digression, but the memory of Mr. Jacob Weinberg who so befriended me, started me off on a subject about which I am acutely concerned.

The problem, therefore, facing Walter and myself was what should we do? I understood Walter's fate was largely in my hands. If I could induce him to behave himself and treat me with ordinary decency eventually the Bishop would endeavor to get him another charge in another diocese where he would not be handicapped by his past, though the bishop of that diocese would, of course, have to know the details. I remember well the evening in which I put the situation flatly and baldly to Walter, after having a long talk with the Bishop. I made him see that his fate [122] did lie in my hands and that it would be the part of wisdom for him to stop knocking me about. I told him that any time I could get a divorce from him on the strength of the testimony of the doctor who had looked after me when Ellison was born and who had seen me with bruises all over my body. This threat from the point of view of the Episcopal Church was potent. His career as a priest would be over. He was a proud man and (being inwardly shocked by the publicity) from that day on he never laid a finger on me. He sulked and would not talk for days on end and gave me the bulk of the work to do but I had no further cause to be afraid of him.

We took a shack of three rooms in the depths of wild country not far from Pacific Grove and I started in to keep hens, and to make a little money by selling their eggs. I found out very quickly that unless you could keep hens on a very large scale (which involves capital) you don't make much money. Hens are such silly things; they have such silly faces; they have such stupid habits; they are completely devoid of intelligence; the only exciting part about poultry keeping is hunting the eggs, and that's a dirty job. But I did manage to feed the family, and the shack was only $8.00 a month and not worth that.

My life at this time was entirely monotonous - looking after three babies, one morose husband and several hundred stupid hens. We had no bathroom or indoor toilet. Even keeping the children and the place clean was a problem. We had practically no money and part of the grocer's bill was paid with the eggs, which the grocer always took because he was my friend. I used to go out in the surrounding woods with a wheelbarrow, the children trotting after me, and collect the wood for the fires. I cannot, therefore, say that this was a pleasant time. Again, I don't feel humorous about it. It was like an entirely new incarnation [123] and the contrast between this humdrum life of a housekeeper and a mother, poultry keeper and gardener and my rich life as a girl and my full life as an evangelist finally got me completely down.

I felt I was of no use to anybody; that I must have gone off the track along some line or else I would not be in this position. The old Christian complex of being a "miserable sinner" overwhelmed me. My conscience, morbidly conditioned by the fundamentalist theology, kept telling me I was paying the penalty of my questioning doubts and that if I had held on to my girlhood faith and surety I would not now be in this pickle. The church had failed me, because Walter was a churchman and the other churchmen I had met seemed to be so mediocre, with the exception of the Bishop. He was a saint but then, I argued, he would have been a saint anyway even if he had been a plumber or a stockbroker. I knew enough of theology to have lost my faith in theological interpretations and I felt that there was nothing left me except a vague belief in Christ, Who at this time seemed very far away. I felt deserted by God and man.

Let me say here that there is no question in my mind that the Church is playing a losing game unless it changes its technique. I cannot understand why churchmen do not move with the times. All evolutionary development in all fields is an expression of divinity and the static condition of theological interpretation is contrary to the great law of the universe, evolution. After all, theology is simply man's interpretation and understanding of what he thinks God means. But it is a human, finite brain that does the thinking and has done the thinking down the ages. Hence other human and finite brains can appear and give other, deeper, more significant or broader interpretations and thus found a more progressive theology. Who dare say that [124] they are not as right as churchmen in the past? Unless the churches broaden their vision, eliminate their disputations concerning non-important details, and preach a Christ, risen, living and loving, and not a Christ, dead, suffering and a sacrifice to an angry God, they will lose the allegiance of coming generations - and rightly so. Christ lives, triumphant and ever present. We are saved by His life. The death that He died, we can die too - and triumphantly, the Bible says so. The churches will have to begin with their theological seminaries. I have taken a theological training and I know what I am talking about. Intelligent young men will no longer enter them when confronted with ancient meanings to what they recognize as living truths. They are not interested in the Virgin Birth - they are interested in the fact of Christ. They know too much to accept the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures; but they are prepared to believe in the Word of God. Life is so full of movement today, of heroes, of beauty, of tragedy and cataclysm and of reality and glorious opportunity that this generation has no time for the puerilities of theology. Fortunately, there are within the church a few men of vision who will, eventually, change the reactionary attitude, but it will take time. In the meantime, the cults and the isms will engulf the people. This would not be necessary if the Church would wake up and give a seeking, urgent humanity what it needs - not soporifics, not authority, not sweet platitudes - but the living Christ.

After six months of this kind of life, if I remember correctly, I saw the Bishop again and told him that Walter had behaved himself. The Bishop then very kindly set in to find a place where he could again resume his church work. He finally got a small charge in a mining village in Montana, with the understanding that part of his stipend should be sent monthly to me. I, in the meantime, moved [125] to a tiny, three-roomed cottage in a more populated district in Pacific Grove. This was in 1915 and it was the last time I ever saw Walter Evans. Practically none of his stipend was ever sent to me and his letters grew increasingly abusive. They were full of threats and innuendo. There was nothing that I could do and I realized that I must handle my life alone and do what was best for the three little girls.

The war in Europe was in full swing. Every relative that I had was involved. The small income I had came to me erratically. It was heavily taxed and the bank draft sometimes never arrived owing to the sinking of the ship on which the mails went. I was in a most difficult position; without a relative in the country to whom I could go and (apart from the Bishop and his wife) no friends to whom I cared to talk. I was surrounded by kind and good friends, however, but none of them were in a position to do anything for me and looking back now I question if I ever let them know how serious the situation was. The Bishop wanted to write to my people and let them know the situation but I would not let him. I've always been a great believer in the proverb that "as a man makes his bed, so must he lie," and I am not at all a believer in squealing and crying and wailing to one's friends. I knew "God helps those who help themselves" but at this time I admit it seemed to me that God, also, had failed me and I couldn't even go squealing to Him.

I hunted around for something that would bring me a little money, only to discover that I was a perfectly useless person. I could make beautiful lace, but nobody wanted lace and, in any case, I couldn't get the materials for lace making in America. I had no particular gifts; I could not use a typewriter; I could not teach; I did not know what to do. There was only one industry in this district and that was the sardine industry and rather than let the children [126] starve I decided to become a factory hand and. work in a sardine cannery.

I remember the time of crisis when I came to this decision. It was a major spiritual crisis. As I have earlier pointed out, I had arrived in America with much questioning in my mind as to the spiritual verities which could be believed. The theological course which I took on arrival did not help me at all. Any theological course would undermine a man's faith if he is intelligent enough to ask questions and is not of the type that accepts blindly what the churchmen say. The commentaries which I consulted in the theological library seemed to me inane, badly written and platitudinous. They answered no question; they dealt in abstractions; they evaded realities even when claiming to know exactly what God meant and intended, and sought to solve all problems by quoting St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and the saints of the Middle Ages. Theologians never seem to face up to the basic issues; they fall back upon the trite statement that, "God said." But perhaps He didn't; perhaps the translation was wrong; perhaps the phrase under consideration was an interpolation - there are many such in the Bible. Then came the question in my mind: Why did God speak only to Jews? I knew nothing of the other Scriptures in the world and if I had known them I would not have regarded them as Scriptures. There were parts of the Old Testament that shocked me and parts that made me often wonder how they ever got through the mails. In an ordinary book they would have been regarded as obscene, but in the Bible they were all right. I began to wonder if my interpretations were not as good as somebody else's. I remember pondering one day on the verse in the Bible, "The very hairs of your head are all numbered." It seemed to me that God was keeping a lot of statistics. I consulted a theologian in the seminary and found that his [127] answer was that this Biblical statement proved that God was not conditioned by time. I discovered next that the cross was not a Christian symbol but that it long antedated Christianity and this was a final blow.

I was, therefore, completely disillusioned by life, by religion with its orthodox presentation and by people, particularly my own husband whom I had idealized. No one needed me, except three babies, and I used to be needed by hundreds and thousands. Only a small handful of people cared in their busy lives what happened to me and I used to matter to lots of people. I seemed to have reached the point where I was absolutely useless, just doing the chores and the ordinary routine of small town living which hundreds of women, with less background, education and brains were probably doing better. I was tired of washing diapers and cutting bread and butter. I knew the meaning of complete despair. The only comfort which I had were the children and they were so tiny that their healing quality lay in their lack of understanding.

The climax of this came on a day when I was quite desperate and, leaving the children in the care of a neighbor, I went out into the woods alone. For hours I lay on my face wrestling with my problem and then, standing up under a big tree, which I could probably find again if that piece of ground has not been built over, I told God that I was quite desperate, that I would take anything that I had to take if it would only release me to a more useful life. I told Him that I had exhausted the resources of doing "everything for Jesus' sake"; that I did do everything for His sake, as far as I could; that I swept and dusted and cooked and washed and looked after the babies to the very best of my ability, and so what.

I remember so distinctly the depths of my despair when I got absolutely no response. I was so sure that if I was [128] desperate enough that I would get a response; that I would again have some kind of a vision, or that I would hear a voice as I had at times heard a voice, telling me what to do. But I had no vision; I heard no voice; and I just trotted home to get supper. Yet, all the time, I had been heard but didn't know it. All the time plans were being laid for my release, but I was quite unaware of it. Unseen by me a door was opening and even though I did not realize it, I was facing the happiest and richest part of my life. As I told my daughter years later, "We never know what lies around the corner."

The next morning I went down to one of the great sardine canneries and applied for a job. I got it, as it was the rush season and they needed hands. I made an arrangement with a neighbor to look after the babies, paying her half of what I earned, whatever that might be. The work was piece work and I knew that I was quick and I hoped to earn good money and I did. I went down each morning at 7 a.m. and returned home around 4 in the afternoon. For the first three days the noise, the smells and the unfamiliar surroundings and the long walks to the factory and back to the cottage affected me so much that the moment I got into the cottage I fainted dead away.

But I got accustomed to it, for Nature is very adaptable, and I regard this period as one of the most interesting experiences of my life. I was down among the people; I was just nobody and I had always thought I was somebody. I was holding down the kind of job that anybody could hold down. It was unskilled labor. At first I went into the labeling department, labeling the large, oval cans of Del Monte sardines; but I could not make enough money at this to warrant my effort. I met with much kindness in this department. I think everybody saw that I was scared, for one day the man who threw the cans of sardines on [129] the table to be labeled poked me in the ribs, in an uncouth way, and said, "Say, I've found out who you are. My wife's sister comes from R - and she told me about you. If you need a man to stick up for you and to stop anybody being rude to you, just remember I'm here." He never intruded again but he kind of watched over me. I always had cans to label and I am very grateful to him.

I was advised to go into the packing department to pack the sardines in cans and this I did. It was a much rougher group of factory hands - rather tough women, Mexicans and the type of man I had never met before - even in social work. When I first went into this department they made it hard for me by poking fun at me. I didn't belong, apparently. I was obviously too good and, of course, exceedingly proper and they did not know what to make of me. A gang of them used to collect near the gate of the factory and when I hove in sight they'd start singing, "Nearer my God to Thee." I didn't like it at first and used to shudder at the thought of going through the gate but, after all, I'd had a lot of experience in handling men and little by little I won them, so that I really had a good time. I never lacked for fish to pack. A clean newspaper would find its way mysteriously on to my stool. They watched out for me in all kinds of ways and I would like again to point out that this had nothing, whatever, to do with me. I did not know the names of these men and women. I had never done them a kindness in my life, but they were just straight good to me and I have never forgotten it. I learnt to like them very much and we grew to be good friends. I never, however, learnt to like the sardines. I made up my mind that if I was going to be a packer I would make it financially worth while. I wanted money for the children, so I brought my mind to bear on the problem of packing. I watched the other [130] packers. I studied every movement so that there would be no waste effort and in three weeks' time I was the show packer in the factory. I handled an average of ten thousand sardines a day and packed hundreds of cans. Visitors to the factory were brought to watch me and then I paid the price of my good work and had to listen to comments such as, "What's a woman like this doing in a factory?" and "She looks too good for her job, but is probably no good." "She must have done something to have brought herself down to this kind of work." "Better not be taken in by appearances, she's probably a bad egg." I am quoting literally. I remember once the foreman of the factory was standing by listening to a group talking about me in this way and watching me squirm. The comments had been particularly rude and my hands were literally shaking with fury. After they had passed on he came up to me and said, with the kindest expression on his face, "Never you mind, Mrs. Evans, we here call you 'the diamond lost in the mud'." I found that full compensation for all that had been said. Is it to be wondered at that I have an unalterable and unshakable faith in the beauty and divinity of humanity? If these had been people who were under obligation to me, the story would be different, but all this expressed the spontaneous kindness of the human soul to people in similar difficulties to their own. The poor are usually kind to the poor.

Let me tell one more story which expresses even more fully this attitude of human kindness. One day when the lunch bell went, a great, hulking, dirty, elderly man - whose appearance was terrible and who smelt to high heaven - came up to me and said, "Come around the corner with me. I want to speak to you." I have never been afraid of men and I went around the corner with him. He stuck his hand down into his jeans and hauled out half a clean, white [131] apron. He said, "See here, Miss, I swiped this off my wife this morning and I'm going to hang it on a nail here. I don't like your drying your hands on that dirty rag in the women's room. I've got the other half and will hang it up when this gets dirty." He turned on his heel before I had time to thank him and never spoke to me again, but there was always a clean rag for me on which to wipe my hands.

I am quite sure that we get what we give in life. I had learnt not to be snooty; I wasn't preachy; I just tried to be polite and kind and, therefore, got politeness and kindness from other people and anyone can do the same - which is the moral of my tale. I remember a few years ago a woman who came to consult me in my office in New York. The burden of her story was that she was having an awful time; everybody was gossiping about her; she did not know how to stop it. She cried and she wept; the world was cruel in what it said and wouldn't I please help her. Never having seen her before and not knowing any of the facts of the case, I did what I could. Curiously enough, a few days later I went into a restaurant and sat down with my husband, Foster Bailey, in a booth. In the next booth I saw this woman though she did not see me. She was with a friend and talking in a loud, clear voice and I could hear every word she said. What she didn't say about her friends is beyond belief. Not a kind word passed her lips. She was giving to her friend what is vulgarly called "the dirt" about all her acquaintances. By listening to her I solved her problem, and when she next came in to see me I told her about it, perhaps rashly for I have never seen her since. She probably did not like me and she certainly did not like the truth.

This work in the factory went on for several months. Walter Evans, in the meantime, had left Montana and had [132] gone to a university in the east to take a postgraduate course. I seldom heard from him. No money came from him and in 1916 I consulted a lawyer about getting a divorce. I could not face the prospect of going back to him or subjecting the children to his tempers and sulkiness. He had given no indication that he had learned anything and evidenced no sense of responsibility where the children and I were concerned. In 1917, when the United States entered the war, he went out to France with the Y.M.C.A., and was in France for the duration. He did most distinguished work and was given the Croix de Guerre. I, therefore, cancelled the divorce proceedings at that time, as there was a strong feeling against women getting divorces when their husbands were absent at the front. It never seemed to me really logical, because the man at the front or the man at home are just the same people. I've never understood, either, why every single soldier in the army is regarded as a hero. He has probably been drafted and has no alternative. I know soldiers very well and I know how they detest the "hero" talk of the newspapers and the public.

I had given up writing to him and began to feel a great sense of relief because he was so far away. The children were well and a great joy and I was all right though I only weighed 99 pounds. I had managed to take care of them and I seemed to be slowly weathering the storm. I was still in the dark, spiritually, but was too busy earning money and taking care of the three little girls to have time to wonder about my soul. [133]

Chapter IV

Walter Evans had left me when I was thirty-five. Much observation had indicated to me that thirty-five is frequently a turning point in many lives. If a person is ever to find their life work, if they are ever in any particular life to attain a measure of surety and usefulness, it will be at that age. Numerologists would affirm that the reason is that 7 X 5 = 35; seven indicating a finished cycle, a completeness, and the opening of a door into a fresh experience; whilst five is the number of the mind and of that intelligent creature we call man. I would not know. I am sure there is something to numerology, for God, we are told, works through numbers and form, but I have never been impressed by numerological deductions.

The fact remains, however, that 1915 saw me entering into an entirely new cycle, and, for the first time, discovering that I had a mind which I began to use, to discover its flexibility and potency, and employ as a "searchlight" into my own affairs and ideas, into the world of surrounding affairs, and into a realm of discovery that we might call spiritual - the world which the ancient Hindu teacher, Patanjali, calls "the raincloud of knowable things."

It was whilst I was passing through the difficult time in which I worked as a factory hand that I contacted Theosophy. I do not like the word in spite of its beautiful connotation and meaning. It stands in the public mind for so much which it essentially is not. I hope to show, if I can, what it really is. This marked the opening of a new spiritual era in my life.

There were two English women living in Pacific Grove at that time who were of the same social background in [134] Great Britain as myself. I had never met them but had wanted to, largely because I was lonely. I would have enjoyed meeting someone from the old country and I had seen them about the streets of the little town. Rumor reached me that they were having a drawing room meeting on some peculiar subject and a mutual friend managed to get me an invitation. My motives in going, therefore, were not of the highest. I did not go to hear something new or interesting, or to get help. I went because I wanted to meet these two women.

I found the lecture very dull and the lecturer very poor. I can imagine no worse lecturer anywhere. He began his talk with the flat statement "Nineteen million years ago the Lords of the Flame came from Venus and planted the seed of mind in man." Except for the Theosophists present I do not think anyone in the room knew what he was talking about. Nothing that he said made any sense to me. One reason was that in those days I took my date of the evolutionary cycle from the Bible and the Bible places the date of creation as having happened in the year 4004 B.C. I had been too busy living and being a mother to have had time to read the current books on evolution. I am not sure I believed in evolution and remember reading Darwin and Herbert Spencer with a feeling of guilt and of disloyalty to God. The idea of the world being nineteen million years old was just sheer blasphemy.

The lecturer wandered all over the world of thought. He told the audience that each of them had a causal body and that apparently that causal body was inhabited by an Agnishvatta. It sounded to me like complete nonsense and I doubt if that kind of lecture ever helps anybody. I registered a resolve at that time that if I ever found myself lecturing I would endeavor to be everything that this Theosophical lecturer was not. But I had gained one thing - the [135] friendship of these two women. They took me immediately in hand and gave me books to read and I was in and out of their home, talking and asking questions, a great deal.

My days then became very long. I would get up in the morning at four o'clock. I would clean the house, prepare the lunch for the three children and at 6 o'clock give them their breakfast, after washing and dressing them. Then, at 6:30 I would take them over to the woman next door and then go down to the factory where I packed those darned sardines. At noon I would be eating my lunch when the day was fine on a strip of beach. Usually by 4 or 4:30 in the afternoon I would be back home. If it was winter time, I would play with the children indoors or read to them. If it was summer time, I would take them down to the beach. By 7 o'clock we would be home for supper and then they all three would be tucked into bed. After putting the clothes to soak or the bread to rise, I would crawl into bed and read quite steadily until midnight.

I have always been one of those people who temperamentally require very little sleep. When I was quite a young girl a doctor told me (and he knew me very well) that I never needed more than four hours sleep a night and he was entirely right. To this day I am usually up at 4:30 a.m. and (after getting my breakfast) I write and work until 7. That has been my life rhythm and perhaps is one of the reasons why I have been able to accomplish so much.

Another reason that has helped me to work hard was the extremely ordered discipline of my life when a girl. This developed in me an inability to be idle. I was never permitted to be idle, so I never am. A third reason is one which I think could be very helpful to many people. There was so much I wanted to know and I had to find the time [136] for all these things and yet not neglect my children. I never neglected the children, but it took some planning, some scheming and some disciplining. I learnt to iron with a book in front of me and to this day I can read and iron simultaneously without scorching the clothes. I learnt to peel potatoes whilst reading without cutting my fingers, and I can shell peas and string beans with a book in front of me. I always read when sewing and mending. This is just because I wanted to and many women could learn to do the same if they cared enough for knowledge. The trouble is many of us don't care enough. I also read with great rapidity, grasping whole paragraphs and pages as quickly as other people read a sentence. I forget what is the technical name for this visual capacity. Lots of people do it and more could if they tried.

I came to an arrangement with my own conscience regarding my duty as a mother and as a housekeeper. I had watched a woman of my acquaintance who had five children. She apparently had a call from the Lord to go and teach and she went and taught - at the expense of the children whom she left at home in the care of the eldest girl, just fifteen years old. The child did her best but caring for four other children is no joke. We all had to help feed them and bathe them and, when necessary, discipline them. It was a lesson to me and a horrible example of what not to do. So I decided that until the girls were in their 'teens I would give them and the house all my time. When they got into their 'teens and were able themselves to be useful, I put the whole thing on a fifty-fifty basis.

Around 1930, when they were all practically grown up, I told them that I was there as consultant and as mother, but that having given them practically twenty complete years, I was from that time on going to put my public work first and them last. I asked them to remember I was [137] always there, and I think they have remembered, or they will after I am gone.

So I read and studied and thought. My mind woke up as I struggled with the presented ideas and sought to fit my own beliefs and the new concepts together. Then I met two very old ladies who lived side by side in two cottages - indispensable to each other and quarreling all the time. They were both of them personal pupils of H. P. Blavatsky. They had trained with her and studied with her.

I had just made the acquaintance of her great book "The Secret Doctrine." I was intrigued by it but completely bewildered. I couldn't make head or tail of it. It is a difficult book for beginners for it is badly put together and lacks continuity. H.P.B. starts with one subject, wanders off to another, takes up a third at length and - if you search - you will find her returning to her original theme sixty or seventy pages further on.

Claude Falls Wright, who was H. P. Blavatsky's secretary, told me himself that in writing this monumental work (for that is what it is) H.P.B. would write page after page, never numbering the pages, and simply throw them on the floor beside her as she finished them. When she was through writing for the day Mr. Wright and her other helpers would collect the sheets and endeavor to get them into some kind of order and, as he said, the wonder was that the book is as clear as it is. Its publication, however, was a great world event and the teaching it contains has revolutionized human thought, little as people may realize it.

I regard the hours of study that I expended over it as some of the most valuable hours of my life and the background and knowledge it gave me has made all the best of my work along occult lines possible. I sat up in bed reading "The Secret Doctrine" at night and began to [138] neglect reading my Bible, which I had been in the habit of doing. I liked the book and, at the same time, I disliked it cordially. I thought it was very badly written, incorrect and incoherent but I could not get away from it.

Then these two old ladies took me in hand. Day after day, for weeks, they taught me. I moved over into a little cottage so as to be near them. It was safe ground for the children, trees to climb, gardening to do and no care to make me anxious. So, whilst they played, I would sit on the porch in one or other of the cottages and talk and listen. Many of H.P.B.'s personal pupils have helped me and have personally taken the trouble to see that I understood what it was that was happening to human thought through the publication of "The Secret Doctrine." I have often been amused by the orthodox Theosophists who have disapproved of my presentation of theosophical truth. Few of them, if any, who have thus disapproved ever had the privilege of being taught by personal pupils of H.P.B. for weeks and months on end, and I'm pretty sure that, thanks to these old students, I have a clearer perception of what "The Secret Doctrine" was intended to convey than most of them. Why should I not? I was well taught and I am grateful.

I had joined the Theosophical Lodge in Pacific Grove and was beginning to teach and hold classes. I remember the first book which I started to expound. It was that great book by Mrs. Besant, "A Study in Consciousness." I knew nothing about consciousness and I could not possibly define it but I kept six pages ahead of the class and somehow managed to get away with it. They never discovered how little I knew. I know that no matter what the class learned I learned a great deal.

What was it that I learned that was beginning to satisfy my questioning mind and my disturbed heart? I had been [139] left adrift on a pinnacle of dissatisfaction. I was sure at that time of only two things; the fact of Christ and certain inner contacts which I could not possibly deny and not be untrue to myself, though I could not explain them. Now, to my amazement, light was beginning to dawn. I discovered three new (to me) basic ideas and eventually they all fitted into the general program of my spiritual life and gave me a clue to world affairs. Do not forget that the first phase of the world war ( 1914-1918) had opened; I am writing this at the close of the second phase (1939-1945).

I discovered, first of all, that there is a great and divine Plan. I found that this universe of ours is not a "fortuitous concurrence of atoms" but that it is the working out of a great design or pattern which will be all to the glory of God. I found that race after race of human beings had appeared and disappeared upon our planet and that each civilization and culture had seen humanity step forward a little further upon the path of return to God.

I discovered, for the second thing, that there are Those Who are responsible for the working out of that Plan and Who, step by step and stage by stage, have led mankind on down the centuries. I made the amazing discovery, amazing to me because I knew so little, that the teaching about this Path or this Plan was uniform, whether it was presented in the Occident or in the Orient, or whether it had emerged prior to the coming of Christ or afterwards. I found that the Head of this Hierarchy of spiritual Leaders was the Christ and when this dawned on me, I felt that He had been given back to me in a nearer and more intimate way. I found that He was "the Master of all the Masters and the Teacher alike of angels and of men." I found that the Masters of the Wisdom were His pupils and disciples, just as people like myself were pupils of some Master. I learnt that when I, in my orthodox days, talked about Christ [140] and His Church I was really speaking of Christ and the planetary Hierarchy. I found that the esoteric presentation of truth in no way belittled Christ. He was, indeed, the Son of God, the First Born in a great family of brothers, as St. Paul has told us, and a guarantee to us of our own divinity.

The third teaching which I came across and which pulled me up short for a long time was the dual belief in the law of rebirth and the law of cause and effect, called Karma and Reincarnation by Theosophists who, so often, like to sound learned. Personally, I believe that all this most necessary teaching would have made far more rapid progress if Theosophists had not been so overcome and glamored by the Sanskrit terms. If they had taught about the law of rebirth instead of the doctrine of reincarnation and if they had presented the Law of Cause and Effect instead of the Law of Karma, we might have had a more general recognition of the truth. I say this in no critical spirit, because I succumbed to the same glamor. Looking back now to my early classes and lectures, I laugh with amusement at my ponderous use of technical phrases of Sanskrit words and of the detailed significances of the Ageless Wisdom. I find that I get simpler as I get older and may be a little wiser.

With the discovery that there was a law of rebirth I found many of my problems, personal and individual, were capable of solution. Many who come to a study of the Ageless Wisdom find it difficult at first to accept the fact of the Law of Rebirth. It seems so revolutionary; it is apt to evoke a spirit of weariness and of spiritual fatigue. One life seems hard enough without contemplating many lives, both behind us and before us. Yet, if one studies the alternatives to the theory, it seems possibly the best and the most tenable. There are only two other theories which [141] really warrant attention. One is the "mechanical" alternative, which considers man is purely material, soulless and ephemeral so that (when he dies) he dissolves again into the dust from which he came; thought, under this theory, is simply a secretion of the brain and its activity, just as other organs produce their peculiar phenomenal secretion and there is, therefore, no purpose or reason for man's existence at all. This I could not accept, nor is it widely accepted anywhere.

Then there is the "one creation" theory of the orthodox Christian, which I had held without any speculation as to its truth. This posits an inscrutable God Who sends human souls into incarnation for one life and, according to their actions and their thinking in that one life so will be their eternal future. It endows man with no past, only an important present and an endless future - a future dependent upon the decisions of one life. What governs God's decisions as to a man's place and background and equipment remains unknown. There seems no reason for what He does under this "one creation" plan. I had worried so over the apparent unfairness of God. Why should I have been born in such good circumstances with money, good looks, opportunity, and all the many interesting experiences which life had brought me? Why should there have been people like that wretched little soldier from whom Miss Sandes had rescued me, who was born with no equipment, with obviously no background, with no money and with no capacity in this life for success of any kind? I knew now why I could leave him to God; that both he and I in our separate places would go on climbing the ladder of evolution, life after life, until some day for each of us it would be equally true, "As He is, so are we in this world."

It seemed reasonable to me that, "As a man soweth so shall he also reap," and it was a joy to me to discover [142] that I could call in St. Paul and Christ, Himself, to substantiate these teachings. Clear light was being thrown on the old theology. I was discovering that the only thing that was wrong was man-made interpretations of the truth and it dawned on me how silly it was just because some learned preacher or scholar said that God meant this or that that we should accept it. He might be right and if so, intuitively one would know it; but the intuition does not work unless the mind is developed and that has been a lot of the trouble. The mass of the people do not think and the orthodox theologian, no matter what he says, can always get a following. With the best intentions in the world he exploits the unthinking. It dawned on me, too, that there was really no reason because a priest or teacher six hundred years ago interpreted the Bible in one way (probably suitable for his time and age) that it should be acceptable now in a different time and age, under a different civilization and with widely different problems. If God's truth is truth then it will be expansive and inclusive, and not reactionary and exclusive. If God is God, then His divinity will adapt itself to the emerging divinity of the sons of God, and a son of God today may be a very different expression of divinity from a son of God five thousand years ago.

You will see, therefore, how my whole spiritual horizon was opening up. There was light in the heavens and I was no longer an isolated, deserted, struggling disciple, sure of nothing and with nothing to do as far as I could see. It was slowly dawning on me that I was one of a great company of brothers. It was becoming clear to me that I could cooperate with the Plan if I wanted to, find those who in other lives had worked with me, see to it that what I sowed was good and find my place in Christ's work. I could endeavor to approach a little closer to that spiritual Hierarchy [143] which I had always subconsciously known existed, and which seemed to need workers.

These were the things that were being gradually unfolded in my consciousness in 1916 and 1917. They did not emerge as clear-cut, formulated ideas but as truths which I was slowly recognizing, to which I was making gradual adjustments and for which I had to find application. I watched my own life. I studied the three girls in this connection and I found it most illuminating. I found that my karma with my youngest daughter, Ellison, is largely physical. I had saved her life with the most assiduous care year after year. For eight years she slept with me, by the doctor's orders, so she could absorb my vitality. Day after day by careful watching, by never permitting her to take violent exercise, or climb a hill, or walk up stairs I conquered the heart trouble until today she is the strongest member of the family. Ellison shows no sign of needing me now. She is happily married, lives in India and has two children. I am sure she is proud of me, but our relationship lies in the past. The link between my eldest daughter and me is exceedingly close, which is probably why we have such God-awful rows. There is a very strong inner attachment and though I see little of her now I am sure of her and she is sure of me. My second daughter, Mildred, has a very close karma with me. We are peculiarly attached and yet I know she feels entirely free. Even though she has been twice married, we have always been together under the most peculiar circumstances and I have been grateful for her love and above all for her friendship. It would be so good if mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, valued friendship in their relations more than they do. I am confident that if I could look back into our past relationships under the Law of Rebirth, the present really happy situation between my three girls and myself would be clearly [144] explained. Do not infer from this that we always get on. There have been stormy scenes and misunderstandings. They have not always understood me, and I have often agonized over them, and wanted to change things, and hoped they would act differently, etc., etc.

It was towards the close of 1917 that Walter Evans went out with the Y.M.C.A., to France and my friend, the Bishop, arranged that I should have an allotment of one hundred dollars a month from his salary. This was sent direct to me by the Y.M.C.A., until his work with them ceased. This, with my own small income (which was beginning to dribble through more regularly) enabled me to drop my work as a sardine packer and make other plans. My work with the Theosophical Lodge in Pacific Grove was having results and I was beginning to get a little bit known as a student.

It was suggested to me that in view of the fact that my finances were somewhat stabilized I go down to Hollywood where the headquarters of the Theosophical Society, at Krotona, were to be found. I decided to make the move and towards the end of 1917 we went down. I found a small house, close to the T.S. headquarters, and I settled there with the children, in a cottage on Beechwood Drive.

Hollywood was relatively unspoiled in those days. The movie industry was, of course, the major industry, but the town remained at that time quite simple. The main streets were all lined with pepper trees and there was not the breathlessness, the mad rush, the brittle brilliancy and the glare of modern Hollywood today. It was then a gentler and sweeter place. I would like to go on record of the lasting impression which I carried away when I left the town, of the soundness, the kindness, the expansiveness and the understanding of the leading movie people. I have met many of the movie people and they are grand and [145] human folk. Of course there is a bad element but I would like to know in what section of human society you will not find a bad element? There are evil people in all groups and communities and sets and organizations. There are outstandingly good people also and people of a dead level mediocrity who have not enough development to be either very good or very bad.

I was driving down Fifth Avenue a few years ago and the taxi driver turned to me and said, "Say, Madam, have you ever known a nice Jew?" I replied that I surely had and that some of my closest friends were Jews. He then inquired if I had ever known a bad Jew and I replied that I had known lots of them. He then proceeded to ask if I had ever known a nice Gentile and I naturally replied, "Of course. In fact, I think I am one myself." He next asked me if I had known some bad Gentiles and I made the same reply. "Well, then you see, Madam, what's left? Just human beings." And that has been my experience everywhere. No matter what the race or nation, basically we are all alike. We have the same faults and failings, the same urges and aspirations, the same goals and desires and I believe that we need to realize this more keenly and practically.

We need, also, to free ourselves from the impression which history and its crystallizing nationalisms have laid upon us. The past history of every nation is a sorry story but it conditions our thinking. Great national thought-forms rule the activities of every nation and it is from these that we need liberation. This can be easily seen if we look at some of the leading nations and their characteristics. Take the United States. The Pilgrim Fathers have set their seal or stamp upon this country, but I am inclined to agree with a friend of mine who remarked that the real founders of America were the brave Pilgrim mothers because they man [146] aged to live with the Pilgrim fathers, for the United States is a feminine civilization. The Pilgrim Fathers must have been a very narrow, hard-boiled, superior set of men and most difficult to get on with, for they were always right.

The cautiousness, reticence and sense of superiority of the British is something from which they must release themselves, and the certainty of the French that the glory which is France and which made her a leader in the middle ages must again be restored for the good of Europe, has to be overcome. Every nation has its outstanding faults and of these the other nations are more conscious than of the virtues. The livingness of America is forgotten in the irritation evoked by our bombastic boasting. The inherent justice of the British is overlooked when the Britisher is seen refusing to explain himself. The brilliance of the French intellect is not emphasized by those who are aware of France's complete lack of any international consciousness. And today the U.S.A. with its youthful exuberance, its promising surety, and its juvenile ability to settle all problems, their own and the rest of the world, is working out that inheritance towards a future of wonder and usefulness and beauty unparalleled.

The same criticisms and the same recognitions of virtue could be posited for all and every nation and it is the same with people. We all have outstanding faults which shriek so loud to the world that our equally outstanding virtues are forgotten. One of the things that troubled me when I started to write this autobiography was the fear that perhaps, unconsciously and without deliberate intent, I would make out a good case for myself. I have good points; I cannot be turned from my purpose; I really love people; I'm not a bit proud. I have a reputation of pride but I think it is largely due to posture. I walk very straight and hold my head high but so would you if (as a girl in [147] the school room) you'd had to do your lessons whilst holding three books on the top of your head and having a sprig of holly under your chin. I do not think I am a selfish person and I'm not greatly given to thinking of my health and I think I can truthfully say I'm not full of self pity. I am normally conservative and used to be very critical but I am not really critical any more because I have a knack of seeing why people are what they are; no matter what their faults it doesn't alter my attitude to them. I do not harbor resentments, perhaps largely because I'm too busy to be bothered, and because I do not like a festering point of poison in my mind. I'm sure I am irritable and I know I am difficult to live with because I drive myself and I drive everybody associated with me, but my outstanding fault and the one which has given me the most trouble throughout my life is fear.

I mention this most deliberately because I have discovered that when my friends and students find out that I've been the victim of fear all my life they are greatly relieved and helped. I have been afraid of failure, afraid of having faults, afraid of what people think of me, and afraid of the dark, and afraid of being looked up to by other people. I have never found it anything but a detriment to be put upon a pedestal and looked up to. I agree with the Chinese proverb which says that, "He who stands upon a pedestal has nowhere to step but off." I find the attitude of the average head of a group or occult teacher and many of the priests and clergy most irritating. They pose as if they were really the anointed of the Lord; as if they were different from other people and not just human beings trying, with simplicity, to help their fellowmen. As the result of my background and training I used to be very much afraid of what people said. I don't care now because I find that, right or wrong, you are always wrong with certain sections [148] of the public. Most of my fears are for other people - my husband and my children - but I have one personal fear to which I never give way but which is always with me, I am afraid of the dark at night if I'm alone in the house or apartment. I never knew what this fear was until I was working in the Quetta Soldiers Home. I have brought up my three girls not to be afraid of the dark, but I had an experience then which did something to me and, although I have never permitted it to affect my actions, I have had to fight it ever since.

My fellow worker had been very ill of typhoid. I had nursed her through the crisis and then she had been moved to a hospital, so that I was left alone in the enormous Soldiers Home and, being very young and very proper, I would not permit the two English managers of the home (ex-soldiers) to sleep in the building with me because I thought it might occasion talk and gossip. So each night when the soldiers had left, one of them would take me to my room, around 11:30 p.m., look in my bathroom and cupboards, peek under the bed and then lock all the doors into my bedroom. I could then hear him going through the rest of the rooms. There were four doors in my room, one on to the verandah, another into the sitting-room and still another into my fellow-worker's bedroom and then my bathroom door. I was never the least nervous and the search of my quarters was a precaution on the man's part and the bed stood in the exact center of the room with its legs in deep saucers because of insects. At that time in India, we always slept with a lamp alight in the room.

I awoke around two o'clock in the morning to hear a noise in the sitting-room and to see the handle of the door being turned and twisted. It was fortunately locked. I knew it could not be one of the managers and I could not hear or see the watchman, so I guessed it was some hill [149] man or thief trying to get into the safe in the sitting-room. Many hundreds of rupees were deposited in that safe each night. It was the time of the year in which members of the hill tribes were allowed down into the cantonment. All guards were doubled and every care taken to keep them under surveillance, for those were stormy days on the frontier. I knew that if they succeeded in getting into my room it would be the end of me because it was a great virtue to kill a white woman. It would mean a knife in my heart. For forty-five minutes I sat on my bed watching them trying to break down those very strong doors. They did not dare go to the verandah door for fear of being seen and to get to me via my bathroom or the other bedroom meant breaking down two doors in each case and the risk of noise was too great. I discovered then that there comes a point in fear when you are so desperate that you will take any chance. I walked across my room and opened the door only to find the two managers on the other side, wondering whether I was alive or dead and consulting with each other whether they should knock on the door and awaken me. They had been sleeping in the garden in tents and bad caught the two hill men but most stupidly had not had the sense to hammer loudly on my door and call out, in which case I would not have been frightened. For the time being, after that, my bearer, old Bugaloo, slept outside on the verandah and I could easily call him.

Two or three months after that I went back to the old country and spent some weeks stopping in an old Scotch house where I had stopped year after year as a child. There was a large house-party, about eighteen people, stopping in the house at the time and by mistake (as his room was next to mine) the very nicest man in the house walked into my room one night. He had been reading late, down stairs, and the wind had blown out his candle as he came up and [150] at the same time had blown open my door. He hoped to find his door easily by passing his hand along the wall as his door was next to mine. Finding an open door he naturally thought it was his dressing room. In the meantime, the wind had awakened me and I jumped out of bed to shut the window and bumped into him. This, coming on top of my experience a few months earlier, did not help and laid the foundation for a state of fear which I have never succeeded in overcoming.

I have had two other very bad frights in my life when alone in a house and cannot claim to have any courage, except that I have not permitted it to condition my actions and I stay alone when I have to. I'm terrified of things happening to the girls and as my imagination always works overtime I know that I have spent a great deal of my life worrying over things that never happened.

Fear is a basic characteristic of humanity. Everybody is afraid and everybody has his pet fear. If people tell me that they are never afraid, I know that they are liars. They have some fear somewhere of some thing. Fear is nothing to be ashamed of and very frequently the more highly developed you are and the more sensitive you are, the more fears to which you may react. Apart from one's pet phobias and fears, sensitive people are prone to tune in on the fears of other people, on their depressions and on their terrors. They are, therefore, assimilating fears which do not belong to them but which they are unable to distinguish from their own innate fears. This is very terribly true today. Fear and horror rule the world and it is easy for people to be overcome with fear. War breeds fear and Germany, with her terror tactics traded on that and did everything possible to enhance world terror. It will take us a long time to eradicate fear, but we are making one step towards it when we talk or work for security. [151]

There are schools of thought which teach that fear, if indulged in, will materialize that which you fear. Personally, I do not believe a word of it because I have spent my life fearing all kinds of things which have never happened and as I am a rather powerful thinker I surely could have materialized something if it had been possible. The question might be asked how can one combat fear? Well! I can only tell what I myself have found successful. I never attempt to combat fear. I take the positive position that I will live with my fears if necessary and I just pay no attention to them. I don't fight them; I don't argue with myself; I simply recognize my fears for what they are and pass on. I think people have to learn a much more patient acceptance of what is, and not spend so much time wrestling with themselves over their individual problems. Other people's problems are more profitable from the angle of general helpfulness. Concentration on service can and does lead to self-forgetfulness.

Also, I have asked myself, why should I not be afraid? All the world is afraid and who am I that I should be exempt from the common lot. And this same argument applies to many things. Those schools of thought which tell the public that because they are divine they should be exempt from sorrow, ill health and poverty, are misleading the public. They are in the majority, of course, quite sincere but their emphasis is wrong. They lead the public to think that material well-being and prosperity is a thing of paramount importance and that they are entitled to it and will get it if they affirm their divinity - a divinity which is there but which they are not evolved enough as yet to express. Why should I be exempt from these things when all humanity is suffering from them? Who am I that I should be rich, for neither poverty nor riches really matter? Who am I that I should have perfect health when the fate of humanity [152] at this time seems to indicate something different? I believe firmly that when I can, through the process of evolution, fully express the divinity that is in me I shall have perfect health. I shall not care whether I am rich or poor, and having a popularity with other personalities will not matter to me at all.

I am bringing this up most definitely because these misleading doctrines are sweeping the public consciousness and lead eventually to disillusionment. The time will come when we shall be liberated from all the ills of the flesh, but when it does come we shall have learned a different sense of values and will not be using our divine powers to get material good for ourselves. All good things come to those who live harmlessly, who are kind and considerate as well. But harmlessness is the key and I leave you to find out for yourselves how difficult it is to be harmless in word and deed and thought.

Life in Hollywood was now easier for me. The children were old enough to go to school and kindergarten. I had many friends and the grounds at Krotona, the Theosophical Headquarters, were delightful. Krotona was a community of about five hundred people, some living on the grounds and some elsewhere in Hollywood or Los Angeles. There were lecture halls, class rooms, a shrine room where members of the Esoteric Section met and a cafeteria which fed the people. The place was beautifully run and, when I got there at first, it seemed to me to be a paradise on earth. Everybody there appeared to me to be deeply spiritual. I thought the leaders and teachers were at least initiates of high degree. I attended meetings and classes and learnt a great deal for which I am very grateful.

After I had been there a short time I was asked to run the cafeteria and - ignorance being bliss - I joyously accepted the responsibility. It was, of course, strictly vegetarian, [153] and I had been a vegetarian ever since coming across the Theosophical teaching. My children had never tasted meat or chicken or fish and I suffered from the normal superiority complex which is often an outstanding characteristic of a vegetarian.

I am convinced that there comes a phase in the life of all disciples when they must be vegetarians. In the same way, there must come a life in which a man or woman should be a celibate. This they must be in order to demonstrate that they have learned control of the physical nature. Once they have learned that control and once they can no longer be swayed by the appetites of the flesh, they can be married or not married, they can eat meat or not eat meat as seems best to them and as their karma may indicate or their circumstances dictate. Once that has been proven, the situation is altered. The physical disciplines are a phase of training and when the lesson is learnt they are no longer needed.

The argument for vegetarianism, based on the cruelty of animal eating, may not be as sound as it appears to the emotional and sentimental types. I worried about this a great deal, because I love animals. I would like here to make two suggestions which I have found helpful. There is a law of sacrifice governing all the evolutionary process. The vegetable kingdom draws its sustenance out of the mineral kingdom, for its roots are in the mineral kingdom. The animal kingdom, on a very large scale, draws its sustenance out of the vegetable kingdom and it lives by the life of that kingdom. Some of the higher animals are carnivorous and, under the law of evolution, prey upon each other, but they are not incited thereto by man's thought, as some fanatics claim. Sequentially, then, the human kingdom might well be regarded as drawing its sustenance out of the animal kingdom and, because man is the macrocosm for all the three lower kingdoms, he might be supposed, [154] normally, to draw his life from all the three, and he does. In the ancient scriptures of the East, it is pointed out that the human kingdom is "the food of the gods" and in that statement the great "chain of sacrifice" is complete. My second point has reference to the law of cause and effect, or of Karma, as the Theosophists call it. In the early days of primitive man, men were the victims of the animal kingdom and they were quite defenseless. The wild animals of the past preyed upon human beings. In all kingdoms the Law of Retribution works. It is possible that it is this law which is one of the factors inclining humanity towards meat eating. I worked this out in my own consciousness in due course of time but not rapidly.

I ran the cafeteria and learnt to be a good vegetarian cook. My first chore at Krotona was emptying the garbage pails, so I began at the very bottom, and I watched the people - most of them unknown to me - with great interest. I liked so many of them so very much. I cordially disliked a few. I came to two conclusions, that in spite of all the talk about a balanced diet, they were not a particularly healthy lot, and I found, also, that the more rigid and sectarian the approach to vegetarianism, the more critical and superior the person appeared to be. There were vegetarians at Krotona who would eat neither cheese, nor milk, nor eggs because they were animal products and they felt that they were very, very good and well on the way to spiritual enlightenment. But no one's reputation was safe in their hands. I have wondered about this and I have definitely come to the conclusion that it is better to eat beefsteak and have a kind tongue than to be a strict vegetarian and, from a pedestal of superiority, look down upon this world. Again, I would point out that generalizations are inexact. I have known many vegetarians who were lovely and sweet and kind and good. [155]

It was during this year, 1918, that I discovered for the first time who it was that had come to see me in Scotland when I was a girl of fifteen. I had been admitted into the Esoteric Section (E.S.) of the Theosophical Society and was attending their meetings. The first time that I went into the Shrine Room I saw the customary pictures of the Christ and the Masters of the Wisdom, as the Theosophists call Them. To my surprise there, looking straight at me, was a picture of my visitor. There was no mistake. This was the man who had walked into my aunt's drawing room, and it was not the Master Jesus. I was inexperienced then and rushed to one of the senior people at Krotona and asked for the name of this Master. They told me that it was the Master K.H. and then I made a basic mistake for which I have since paid the price. Believing that they would be pleased and not intending in the very least to be boastful I said, in all innocence, "Oh, then, He must be my Master, for I've talked with Him and been under His guidance ever since." This person looked at me and said, with rather a withering inflection, "Am I to understand that you believe yourself to be a disciple?" For the first time in my life I was up against the competitive technique of the Theosophical Society. It was, however, a wholesome lesson for me and I profited thereby. Learning to hold one's tongue is essential in group work, and one of the first lessons which any one affiliated with the Hierarchy has to learn.

During all this time the children were growing and learning and were increasingly a delight to me. There was nothing in Walter Evans' very brief occasional letters to indicate a change of heart and I began again to consider the necessity of getting a divorce. As the end of the war approached, I consulted a lawyer and was advised that I would have no difficulty.

In January, 1919, I met Foster Bailey and later, after [156] I had been granted my divorce, we became engaged to be married. Divorce proceedings had been instituted before I met him. I had dreaded and feared the divorce trial but nothing could have been simpler. The evidence was too good and the witnesses too reputable. An old friend of mine of long standing, Mrs. John Weatherhead, went with me to the trial. I was sworn in; the judge asked me one or two questions as to residence and age of the children and then said, "I have read the depositions of your witnesses, Mrs. Evans, take your decree and the custody of the children. Good morning - next case." So that cycle ended. I was free and I knew that I had done the best thing for the children. California is one of the most difficult states in which to get a divorce and the rapidity of my divorce trial testifies to the rightness of my case and the correctness of my evidence. Walter Evans did not contest it.

During 1919 Foster Bailey and I grew more and more active in Theosophical work and associated very closely with us was Dr. Woodruff Shepherd. I was then living on Beechwood Drive with the three children and Foster Bailey was living in a tent at Krotona. He had been demobilized after the Armistice but had been on sick leave for months as he had crashed whilst piloting a plane, training army observers. I had been introduced to him, after a lecture I had given at Krotona, by Dot Weatherhaed, who not only introduced him to me but was also instrumental in introducing me to occult truth and to Krotona. Foster's recollection of that introduction is summed up in the words: "All I saw was a hank of hair and a bony female!" I have always had lots of hair. It is a family inheritance and my three girls have masses of lovely hair. I shall never forget a remark of my eldest daughter, Dorothy (who is famous for her remarks with a double meaning). I had washed [157] my hair one day in England and was sitting out in the garden at Ospringe Place, Faversham, drying it. Dorothy looked out of the window and called out, "Oh! Mother, if you would only keep your back to people and they saw only your lovely hair, they would never guess how old you are!"

Towards the end of 1919 Mr. Bailey was made National Secretary of the Theosophical Society. Dr. Shepherd was made Publicity Director and I became editor of the sectional magazine, The Messenger, and chairman of the committee which was running Krotona. All phases of the work and all the different policies and principles governing the administration were, therefore, open to us. The General Secretary, Mr. A.P.Warrington, was a close friend, and all the senior workers were friends and there seemed to be great harmony and a truly cooperative spirit. Little by little, however, we discovered how superficial this harmony was. Little by little we entered upon a most difficult and distressing time. Our affection and personal loyalties were with our friends and co-executives, but our sense of justice and our adherence to the governing principles were constantly being outraged. The truth of the matter was that the management of the Theosophical Society in the United States, and still more so in Adyar (the international center), was at that time reactionary and old-fashioned whereas the new approach to life and truth, freedom of interpretation and impersonality were the characteristics which should have governed policies and methods but did not.

The society was founded for the establishing of universal brotherhood but it was degenerating into a sectarian group more interested in founding and sustaining lodges and increasing the membership than in reaching the general public with the truths of the Ageless Wisdom. Their policy of admitting nobody into the E.S. for spiritual teaching [158] unless they had been for two years a member of the T.S. is proof of this. Why should spiritual teaching be withheld until a person had demonstrated for two years their loyalty to an organization? Why should people be required to sever their connection with other groups and organizations and pledge their loyalty to what is called the "Outer Head" of the E.S. when the only loyalties which should be required are those dedicated to the service of one's fellowmen, the spiritual Hierarchy and, above all, one's own soul? No personality has the right to ask spiritual pledges from other personalities. The only pledge that any human being should give is, first of all, to his own inner divinity, the Soul, and later, to the Master under Whose guidance he can more efficiently serve his fellowmen.

I remember at one of the first E.S. meetings I attended Miss Poutz, who was the secretary of the E.S. at that time., made the astounding statement that no one in the world could be a disciple of the Masters of the Wisdom unless they had been so notified by Mrs. Besant. That remark broke a glamor in me, although I did not speak of it at that time except to Foster Bailey. I knew I was a disciple of the Master K.H. and had been as long as I could remember. Mrs. Besant had evidently overlooked me. I could not understand why the Masters, Who were supposed to have a universal consciousness, would only look for Their disciples in the ranks of the T.S. I knew it could not be so. I knew They could not be so limited in consciousness and later I met many people who were disciples of the Masters and who had never been in touch with the T.S. and had never even heard of it. Just as I thought I had found a center of spiritual light and understanding, I discovered I had wandered into another sect.

We discovered then that the E.S. completely dominated the T.S. Members were good members if, and only if, they [159] accepted the authority of the E.S. If they agreed with all the pronouncements of the Outer Head and if they gave their loyalty to the people that the heads of the E.S. in every country endorsed. Some of their pronouncements seemed ridiculous. Many of the people endorsed were mediocre to the nth degree. A number who were looked up to as initiates were not particularly intelligent or loving, and love and intelligence, in full measure, are the hallmark of the initiate. Amongst the advanced membership there was competition and claim making and, therefore, constant fighting between personalities - fighting that was not confined just to oral battles but which found its expression in magazine articles. I shall never forget my horror one day when a man in Los Angeles said to me, "If you want to know what brotherhood is not, go and live at Krotona." He did not know I lived there.

The whole situation was so serious and the split in the section so great between those who stood for brotherhood, for impersonality, for non claim-making and for dedication to the service of humanity that Foster cabled Mrs. Besant to the effect that if the E.S. did not cease dominating the T.S. the E.S. would soon be under very serious attack. About that time Mrs. Besant sent B.P.Wadia over to the States to investigate and find out what was going on, and official meetings were held with Wadia arbitrating. Foster, Dr. Shepherd and myself, along with many others, represented the democratic side: Mr. Warrington, Miss Poutz and those ranged with them represented the side of authority and the domination of the E.S. I had never before in my life been mixed up in an organizational row and I did not enjoy this period at all. I loved some of the people on the other side very much and it distressed me exceedingly. The trouble in time spread to the whole Section and members kept resigning. [160]

In the meantime we had been working hard in our T.S. offices; the children were well; we were planning to get married as soon as things straightened out somewhat. Our own income was quite seriously reduced. The salaries at Krotona were ten dollars per week. Walter Evans' money had ceased coming in since the divorce. Foster had nothing at this time. He had relinquished his legal practice at the time of the war though he had intended resuming it. It was an old, family practice and when he was only twenty-eight he was clearing a large sum per year. This he gave up entirely, in order to help me in the work which was gradually shaping up for us to do - one of the many things which he sacrificed when he chose to throw in his lot with mine. The children adored him and do to this day and the relationship between them has always been one of great affection and, on his part, of great sacrifice.

They adopted him from the start. He made the acquaintance of Dorothy, the eldest, when she was about nine years old, as he was walking up Beechwood Drive to visit me. He heard shrieks and screams coming from a tree ahead of him. As he hurried towards the tree, he saw a small girl hanging by her knees from a bough. He looked up at her and just said, "Drop," and she dropped into his arms, and as he has often said symbolically, she has been there ever since. Mildred was frightfully ill when he first saw her. She was running a case of suppressed measles with a temperature of 106 degrees, though at the time we did not know what it was. She is basically a pronounced introvert and could be depended upon to have "suppressed" measles. We were trying to get a specialist and in the meantime my friend, Mrs. Copley Enos, and I spent the day rolling her in cold sheets trying to bring the fever down. Foster walked in and started in to help us. Mildred gave him one look and they have been exceedingly close [161] ever since. His introduction to Ellison was making friends with a fat and very dirty child, making mud-pies in the back yard.

Foster's life and mine was, therefore, running along the line of united public work and we were planning and arranging for the future. The T.S. situation was getting more and more difficult and plans were being made already for the convention of 1920, where the whole situation blew up. Speaking of my interior experience, I had become as disillusioned with the T.S. as I had with orthodox Christianity but the situation was not so acute because great and basic truths had come to have meaning to me and I was not alone because Foster and I were already planning to get married.

I now come to a happening in my life about which I hesitate to speak. It concerns the work which I have done for the past twenty-seven years. This work has received worldwide recognition and has evoked worldwide curiosity. It has also brought me some ridicule and suspicion, but surprisingly little, and I have been quite able to understand it because I started by being very suspicious myself. I ask myself why I attempt to deal with the matter at all and why I simply do not continue my hitherto fixed policy of letting my work and the books speak for themselves and prove their own best defense. I think my reasons are twofold.

I want first of all to point out the closeness of the link which the inner Hierarchy of Masters is establishing with men and I want to make it easier for other people to do the same kind of work, provided it is the same kind of work. There are so many aspects of so-called psychic writings. People are apt not to differentiate between that which is the expression of wishful thinking or the emergence of a very nice, sweet, well-intentioned, Christian, subconscious, or again automatic writing, the tapping of thought [162] currents (which everybody is doing all the time) or straight fraud; or on the other hand, those writings which are a result of a strong subjective telepathic rapport and a response to impression coming from certain high Spiritual Sources. Again and again in the Bible the words come "And the Lord said," whereupon some prophet or seer wrote down what was said. Much of it is beautiful and of spiritual import. Much of it, however, bears the signature of frail humanity expressing their ideas of God, His jealousy, His spirit of revenge and a great deal of bloodthirstiness. We are told that great musicians hear their symphonies and chorales with an inner ear and then transfer it into musical notation. From whence do our greatest poets and artists down the ages get their inspiration? All from some inner source of beauty.

This whole subject has been made difficult because of the many metaphysical and spiritualistic writings which are of so low an order of intelligence and so ordinary and mediocre in their content that educated people laugh at them and cannot be bothered to read them. I want to show, therefore, that there is another kind of impression and inspiration which can result in writings far above the average and which convey teaching needed by coming generations. I say this in all humility for I am only a pen or pencil, a stenographer and a transmitter of teaching from one whom I revere and honor and have been happy to serve.

It was in November 1919 that I made my first contact with The Tibetan. I had sent the children off to school and thought I would snatch a few minutes to myself and went out on to the hill close to the house. I sat down and began thinking and then suddenly I sat startled and attentive. I heard what I thought was a clear note of music which sounded from the sky, through the hill and in me. Then I heard a voice which said, "There are some books [163] which it is desired should be written for the public. You can write them. Will you do so?" Without a moment's notice I said, "Certainly not. I'm not a darned psychic and I don't want to be drawn into anything like that." I was startled to hear myself speaking out loud. The voice went on to say that wise people did not make snap judgments, that I had a peculiar gift for the higher telepathy and that what I was being asked to do embodied no aspect of the lower psychism. I replied that I didn't care, that I wasn't interested in any work of a psychic nature at all. The unseen person who was speaking so clearly and directly to me then said that he would give me time for consideration; that he would not take my answer then and that he would come back in three weeks' time exactly, to find out what I intended to do.

I then shook myself as if I was awakening from a dream and went home and entirely forgot all about the matter. I never gave it another thought and did not even tell Foster about it. During the interval I never remembered it but, sure enough, at the end of three weeks I was spoken to again one evening as I sat in my sitting-room after the children had gone to bed. Again I refused, but the speaker begged me to reconsider and for a couple of weeks, at least, see what I could do. By this time I was getting curious but not in the least convinced. I would try for a couple of weeks or a month and then decide what I felt about it. It was during these few weeks that I got the first chapters of "Initiation, Human and Solar."

I would like to make it quite clear that the work I do is in no way related to automatic writing. Automatic writing, except in the rarest cases (and, unfortunately, most people think their case is the rare exception) is very dangerous. The aspirant or disciple is never supposed to be an automaton. He is never supposed to let any part of his [164] equipment out of his conscious control. When he does, he enters into a state of dangerous negativity. The material normally then received is mediocre. There is nothing new in it, and it frequently deteriorates as time goes on. Many a time, the subject's negativity permits the entrance of a second force which, for some peculiar reason, is never of as high a standard as the first. Then there comes danger of obsession. We have had to handle many cases of obsession as the result of automatic writing.

In the work that I do there is no negativity but I assume an attitude of intense, positive attention. I remain in full control of all my senses of perception and there is nothing automatic in what I do. I simply listen and take down the words that I hear and register the thoughts which are dropped one by one into my brain. I make no changes in what I give out to the public from that which has been given to me except that I will smooth the English or replace an unusual word with one that is clearer, taking care, always, to preserve the sense as given. I have never changed anything that the Tibetan has ever given me. If I once did so He would never dictate to me again. I want to make that entirely clear. I do not always understand what is given. I do not always agree. But I record it all honestly and then discover it does make sense and evokes intuitive response.

This work of the Tibetan has greatly intrigued people and psychologists everywhere. They dispute as to what is the cause of the phenomenon, and argue that what I write probably comes from my subconscious. I have been told that Jung takes the position that the Tibetan is my personified higher self and Alice A. Bailey is the lower self. Some of these days (if I ever have the pleasure of meeting him) I will ask him how my personified higher self can send me parcels all the way from India, for that is what He has done. [165]

A few years ago a very dear friend and a man who had stood very closely with Foster and me since the inception of our work - Mr. Henry Carpenter - went out to India to try and reach the Masters at Shigatse, a small, native town in the Himalayas, just over the Tibetan frontier. He made this effort three times in spite of my telling him that he could find the Master right here in New York if he took the proper steps and the time was ripe. He felt he would like to tell the Masters, much to my amusement, that I was having too tough a time and that They had better do something about it. As he was a personal friend of Lord Reading, once Viceroy of India, he was given every facility to reach his destination but the Dalai Lama refused permission for him to cross the frontier. During his second trip to India when at Gyantse (the furthest point he could reach near the frontier) he heard a great hubbub in the compound of the dak bungalow. He went to find out what it was and found a lama, seated on a donkey, just entering the compound. He was attended by four lamas and all the natives in the compound were surrounding them and bowing. Through his interpreter, Mr. Carpenter made inquiries and was told that the lama was the abbot of a monastery across the Tibetan frontier and that he had come down especially to speak to Mr. Carpenter.

The abbot told him that he was interested in the work that we were doing and asked after me. He inquired about the Arcane School and gave him two large bundles of incense for me. Later, Mr. Carpenter saw General Laden Lha at Darjeeling. The General is a Tibetan, educated in Great Britain at public school and university and was in charge of the secret service on the Tibetan frontier. He is now dead but was a great and good man. Mr. Carpenter told him of his experience with this lama and told him that he was the abbot of a certain [166] lamasery. The General flatly denied the possibility of this. He said the abbot was a very great and holy man and that he had never been known to come down across the frontier or visit an Occidental. When, however, Mr. Carpenter returned the following year, General Laden Lha admitted that he had made a mistake; that the abbot had been down to see him.

After writing for the Tibetan for nearly a month I got completely scared and absolutely refused, to do any more work. I told the Tibetan that the three little girls had only me to look to, that if I were ill or went crazy (as so many psychics seemed to do) they would be all alone and that I did not dare take the chance. He accepted my decision but told me to try and get in touch with my Master, K.H., and talk the matter over with Him. After thinking it over for a week or so I decided to get in touch with K.H. and proceeded to do so, following the very definite technique He had taught me. When I got my opportunity for an interview with K.H. we talked the whole thing through. He assured me that I was in no danger, either physically or mentally, and that I had the opportunity of doing a really valuable piece of work. He told me that it was He, Himself, Who had suggested that I help the Tibetan; that He was not transferring me into the Tibetan's ashram (or spiritual group) but that He wished me still to work in His. I therefore complied with the wish of K.H. and told the Tibetan that I would work with Him. I have been strictly his amanuensis and secretary and am not a member of His group. He has never interfered with my personal work or training. In the spring of 1920 I entered into a very happy time of collaboration with Him, while working as a senior disciple in the ashram of my own Master.

I've written many books since then for the Tibetan Shortly after finishing the first few chapters of  [167] "Initiation, Human and Solar" I showed the manuscript to B. P. Wadia. He got very excited and told me that he would publish anything that "came from that source" and printed the first few chapters in "The Theosophist," published in Adyar, India. Then the usual theosophical jealousy and reactionary attitude appeared and no more was printed.

The Tibetan's style has improved over the years. He dictated a cumbersome, poor English in the beginning, but between us we have managed to work out a style and presentation which is suited to the great truths which it is His function to reveal, and mine and my husband's to bring to the attention of the public.

In the early days of writing for the Tibetan, I had to write at regular hours and it was clear, concise, definite dictation. It was given word for word, in such a manner that I might claim that I definitely heard a voice. Therefore, it might be said that I started with a clairaudient technique, but I very soon found, as our minds got attuned, that this was unnecessary and that if I concentrated enough and my attention was adequately focused I could register and write down the thoughts of the Tibetan (His carefully formulated and expressed ideas) as He dropped them into my mind. This involves the attaining and preservation of an intense, focused point of attention. It is almost like the ability which the advanced student of meditation can demonstrate to hold one's achieved point of spiritual attention at the very highest possible point. This can be fatiguing in the earlier stages, when one is probably trying too hard to make good, but later, it is effortless and the results are clarity of thought and a stimulation which has a definitely good physical effect.

Today, as the result of twenty-seven years work with the Tibetan I can snap into telepathic relation with Him without the slightest trouble. I can and do preserve my [168] own mental integrity all the time and I can always argue with Him if it seems to me, at times, that - as an Occidental - I may know better than He does as regards points of presentation. When we have an argument along any line I invariably write as He wants the text written, though He is apt to modify His presentation after discussion with me. If He does not change His wording and point of view, I do not change what He had said in any way.

After all, the books are His, not mine, and basically the responsibility is His. He does not permit me to make mistakes and watches over the final draft with great care. It is not just a question of taking His dictation and then submitting it, after I have typed it out, to Him. It is a question of His careful supervision of the final draft. I am mentioning this quite deliberately as quite a few people, when the Tibetan says something with which they do not personally agree, are apt to regard the point of disagreement as having been interpolated by me. This has never happened, even if I do not always agree or understand and I want to reiterate - I have published exactly what the Tibetan has said. On that one point I emphatically take my stand.

Some students, also, when they personally do not understand what the Tibetan means say that His ambiguities, so called, are due to my having wrongly brought through what He was saying. Where there are ambiguities, and there are quite a number in His books, they are due to the fact that He is quite unable to be clearer, owing to the limitations of his readers, and the difficulty of finding words which can express newer truths and those intuitive perceptions which are still only hovering on the borders of man's developing consciousness.

The books that the Tibetan has written are regarded of importance by the Teachers responsible for the giving [169] out of the new truths which humanity needs. New teaching, along the line of spiritual training and the preparation of aspirants for discipleship has also been given. Great changes are being made in methods and techniques and because of this the Tibetan has been peculiarly careful to see that I do not make mistakes.

At the time of the second phase of the World War, which started in 1939, many pacifists and well meaning, though unthinking, people among the students of the Arcane School and the general public, which we could succeed in reaching, took the position that I had written the pamphlets and papers endorsing the United Nations and the need to defeat the Axis Powers, and that the Tibetan was not responsible for the anti-Nazi point of view of these articles. This, again, was not true. The pacifists took the orthodox and idealistic point of view that because God is love it would be impossible for Him to be anti-German or anti-Japanese. Because God is love, He had no alternative, or the Hierarchy either, working under the Christ, to do anything else but stand firmly on the side of those who were seeking to free humanity from slavery, evil, aggression and corruption. The words of the Christ have never been more true, "He that is not with Me is against Me." The Tibetan in His writings at that time took a firm and unshakable stand, and today (1945) in view of the unspeakable atrocities, cruelties and enslavement policies of the Axis nations, His position has been justified.

All this time the situation at Krotona was getting more acute. Wadia had arrived at Krotona (as the representative of Mrs. Besant) and was stirring up trouble and we collaborated with him to the full in order to swing back the Theosophical Society to its original impulse of universal brotherhood. We collaborated because at this time Wadia seemed sound and sincere and to have the interest of the [170] society truly at heart. The cleavage in the society was steadily widening and the line of demarcation between those who stood for the democratic point of view and those who stood for spiritual authority and the complete control of the Theosophical Society by the Esoteric Section was rapidly growing.

The original platform of the T.S. had been founded on the autonomy of the lodges within the various national sections but, at the time that Foster Bailey and I came into the work, this whole situation had been fundamentally changed. Those people were put into office in any lodge who were E.S. members and through them Mrs. Besant and the leaders in Adyar controlled every section and every lodge. Unless one accepted the dictum of the E.S. members in every lodge, one was in disgrace and it was almost impossible for the individual, therefore, to work in the Lodge. The sectional magazines and the international magazine, called "The Theosophist," were preoccupied with personality quarrels. Articles were given up to the attack or the defense of some individual. A strong phase of psychism was sweeping through the society due to the psychic pronouncements of Mr. Leadbeater and his extraordinary control over Mrs. Besant. The aftermath of the Leadbeater scandal was still causing much talk. Mrs. Besant's pronouncements about Krishnamurti were splitting the society wide open. Orders were going out from Adyar, based upon what were claimed to be orders to the Outer Head by one of the Masters, that every member of the Theosophical Society had to throw his interests into one or all of the three modes of work - the Co-Masonic Order, the Order of Service and an educational movement. If you did not do so you were regarded as being disloyal, inattentive to the requests of the Masters and a bad Theosophist.

Books were being published at Adyar by Mr. Leadbeater [171] that were psychic in their implications and impossible of verification, carrying a strong note of astralism. One of his major works, Man: Whence, How and Whither, was a book that proved to me the basic untrustworthiness of what he wrote. It is a book that outlines the future and the work of the Hierarchy of the future, and the curious and arresting thing to me was that the majority of the people slated to hold high office in the Hierarchy and in the future coming civilization were all Mr. Leadbeater's personal friends. I knew some of these people - worthy, kind, and mediocre, none of them intellectual giants and most of them completely unimportant. I had traveled so widely and had met so many people whom I knew to be more effective in world service, more intelligent in serving the Christ, and more truly exponents of brotherhood that my eyes were opened to the futility and uselessness of this kind of literature.

Owing to all these various causes many people were leaving the Theosophical Society in disgust and bewilderment. I have often wondered what would have been the fate of the T.S. if they had had the grit to stay in, if they had refused to be ousted, and if they had fought for the spiritual basis of the movement. But they did not and a great number of the worthwhile people got out, feeling frustrated and handicapped and unable to work. I, personally, never resigned from the society and it is only during the past few years that I have let my annual dues lapse. I am writing about this somewhat at length because it was this situation or background that made it necessary for changes to take place and out of these our work for the next twenty years took shape.

The disciples of all the Masters are everywhere in the world, working along the many different lines to bring humanity into the light and to materialize the kingdom of [172] God on earth, and the attitude of the Theosophical Society in regarding itself as the only channel and its refusal to recognize other groups and organizations as integral and equally important parts of the Theosophical Movement (not the Theosophical Society) in the world is largely responsible for its loss of prestige. It seems rather late now for the T.S., to mend its ways and to emerge from isolation and separateness and to form part of the great Theosophical Movement which is today sweeping the world. This movement is not only expressing itself through the various occult and esoteric bodies, but through the labor unions, through the plans for world unity and postwar rehabilitation, through the new vision in the political field, and through the recognition of the needs of humanity everywhere. The degeneration of the initial, beautiful impulse is heartbreaking to those of us who loved the principles and truths for which Theosophy originally stood.

Let there be no mistake, the movement initiated by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was an integral part of a Hierarchical plan. There have always been theosophical societies down the ages - the name of the movement is not new - but H.P.B. gave it a light and a publicity that set a new note and that brought a neglected and hitherto somewhat secret group out into the open and made it possible for the public everywhere to respond to this very ancient teaching. The indebtedness of the world to Mrs. Besant for the work that she did in making the basic tenets of the T.S. teaching available to the masses of men in every country, is something that can never be repaid. There is absolutely no reason why we should overlook the stupendous, magnificent work she did for the Masters and for humanity. Those who have during the past five years so violently attacked her seem to me of no more importance than fleas attacking an elephant. [173]

In 1920 this whole situation was reaching a climax. The cleavage between the authoritarian of the E.S. and the more democratic minds in the T.S. was steadily widening. In America Mr. Warrington and the E.S. wardens and heads everywhere represented one group, and the other group, at that time, was led by Foster Bailey and B.P.Wadia. This was the situation which was rampant when the famous convention of 1920 took place in Chicago in the summer. I had never been present at any convention in my life and to say that I was disillusioned, disgusted and outraged is putting it mildly. Gathered together was a group of men and women from all parts of the United States who were presumably occupied in teaching and spreading brotherhood. The hatred and rancor, the personality animus and the political manipulation was so outrageous and shocking that I made a vow never to attend another Theosophical Convention again in my life. Next to Mr. Warrington, we were the ranking officials of the T.S. but we were a small minority. It was obvious from the first moment of the Convention that the E.S. was in control and that those who stood for brotherhood and democracy were hopelessly outnumbered and, therefore, beaten.

There were Theosophists on the authoritarian side who were bitterly unhappy. They were controlled by the E.S. but felt that the methods employed were shocking. Many of them did what they could to show a friendly spirit to us as individuals. Some of them, towards the dose of the Convention, were convinced of the rightness of our position and told us so. Others, who came over to the Convention with an open mind, threw the weight of their interests and backing on our side. In spite of it all, however, we were hopelessly defeated and the E.S. was aggressively triumphant. There was nothing for us to do but to return to Krotona and the situation was such that eventually [174] Mr. Warrington was forced to resign as head of the Theosophical Society in America, though retaining his position in the E.S. He was succeeded by Mr. Rogers who was bitterly opposed to us and far more personal in his opposition than Mr. Warrington. The latter realized our sincerity and apart from organizational differences there was a strong affection between Mr. Warrington, Foster and myself. Mr. Rogers was of a much smaller caliber and he threw us out of our positions as soon as he got into power. Thus ended our time at Krotona and our very real effort to be of service to the Theosophical Society. [175]

Chapter V

This chapter indicates a complete line of demarcation between the world with which I have been dealing and the world with which I am dealing now (1947). An entirely new cycle appears. Up till now I have just been Alice Bailey, socialite, mother and church worker; my time has been my own; nobody has known anything about me; I have been able to arrange my days to suit myself except as far as the children were concerned; no one was clamoring for appointments; there were no proofs to read; no public lectures to give; and, above everything else, no unending correspondence and letter-writing to claim my attention. I sometimes wonder if the general public has the faintest idea of the literally appalling number of letters I both dictate and receive. I am not exaggerating when I say that some years I have dictated over 10,000 letters and once I timed myself as regards a current day's correspondence and it took me forty-eight minutes simply to slit the envelopes before I withdrew the letters. When this is the case and when to this must be added the thousands of form letters which I have signed plus the letters which I have written to entire national groups (to which I have affixed no personal signature) you can understand my saying to my husband one day that upon my tombstone there should be the words: "She died smothered in papers." Today my record is about 6000 letters per year because I delegate so much of my correspondence now to men and women who can give more thought, time and consideration to the answering of my correspondence. Sometimes I sign these letters; sometimes I do not and I would like to give my grateful thanks at this point particularly to Mr. Victor Fox and one or two [176] others who have written perfectly wonderful letters for me to correspondents (letters which have received grateful thanks) and have themselves received no credit for the writing. This is what I call selfless service - to write a letter which you do not sign and for which someone else receives thanks.

This whole section of my life, 1921-1931, makes relatively dull reading. I find it difficult to bring into it a light touch or anything that would serve to relieve the monotony of the treadmill into which I entered during these years. Neither Foster Bailey nor I had planned any such life and we have often said that had we known what the future held we would never have started the things which we undertook. It is an outstanding case of the truth of the proverb that "Ignorance is bliss."

After that completely shocking annual convention of the T.S. in Chicago, Foster and I returned to Krotona utterly disillusioned, profoundly convinced that the T.S. was run strictly on personality lines, with the emphasis upon personality status, upon personality devotions, upon personality likes and dislikes and upon the imposition of personality decisions upon a mass of personality followers. We simply did not know what to do or along what line to work. Mr. Warrington was no longer president of the society and Mr. L.W.Rogers succeeded him. My husband was still national secretary and I was still editor of the national magazine and chairman of the Krotona committee.

I shall never forget the morning when, upon his assumption of office, Mr. Rogers took over, we went up to his office to tender to him our desire to continue to serve the T.S.   Mr. Rogers looked at us and asked the question, "Is there any way which you can think, by which you can be of service to me?" Here we were, therefore, without jobs, no money, no future, three children and utterly uncertain [177] as to what it was we wanted to do. A move was instituted to have us ousted off the Krotona grounds but Foster cabled Mrs. Besant and she immediately squashed the effort. It was just a little too raw.

This was a most difficult time. We were not married and Foster was living in a tent on the grounds of Krotona. Being a very circumspect English woman I had a lady living with me to act as a chaperone and prevent dirty gossip. One of the things I have attempted and I think successfully to do is to rescue occultism from defamation. I have tried to make the vocation of occultists respectable and have been surprisingly successful. Whilst I was unmarried and whilst the children were tiny I always had some elderly friend live with me. After marriage my husband and the children themselves have proved adequate protection. For one thing, I have never been interested in any man except my husband, Foster Bailey, and, for another, no really decent and self-respecting woman would live in such a way that her children as they get older are critical of her. This has been very good for the occult movement for today the word occultism has a respectable connotation and lots of worthwhile people are perfectly willing to have themselves recognized by the rest of the world as occult students. I feel that this is one of the things that it was my destiny to help carry out and I do not believe that ever again will the occult field of thought fall into the same disrepute as it did from 1850 until now.

Books are still being written defaming H.P.B. and Mrs. Besant and one wonders what their writers hope to achieve. As far as I can ascertain the modern generation of investigating students are not the least interested in the pros or cons of their characters. It is quite unimportant to them whether so-and-so approves or disapproves of either of these two people. What they are interested in is the [178] teaching and the truth. This is wholesome and right. I wish these modern writers who spend months in raking up dirt and endeavoring to prove someone was vile would realize the stupidity of their activities. They do not touch the truth; they do not change the loyalties of those who know; they do not change the trend towards occult realization and they hurt nobody but themselves.

Life in this postwar world is too important to any man or woman to occupy themselves with defaming and running down people who have been dead for decades. There is work to be done in the world today; there is truth to be recognized and proclaimed and there is no room for muckraking and personality slandering by those who want to make a few hundred dollars from the enemies of a teaching. This is one reason why I am writing this autobiography. The facts are here.

In these early days of which I write no one would have believed that the time would come when the teaching that I was just beginning to give out and the work to which Foster and I dedicated ourselves would assume such proportions, that its various branches are now internationally recognized and that the teaching would have helped so many hundreds of thousands. We stood alone with, perhaps, a few unknown followers against one of the most powerful so-called occult bodies in the world. We had no money and we saw no future ahead. Our joint finances on the day when we sat down to size up the situation and to lay plans for the future were exactly $1.85. It was the end of the month, the rent was due, the grocer's bill for the past month was not paid, nor was the rent or the gas, light or milk bill. As we were not married none of these were Foster's responsibility but, even in those days, he shared all things with me. We were drawing no salaries [179] from the T.S. and my very small income was not available. There seemed nothing for me to do.

Personally, though I am recognized all over the world as a teacher of meditation I have at the same time never relinquished my habit of prayer. I believe that the true occultist uses prayer and meditation interchangeably according to need and that both are equally important in the spiritual life. The trouble with prayer has been that the average human being makes it entirely a selfish thing and a means of acquisition of things for the separated self. True prayer asks nothing for the separated self but it will always be used by those who seek to help others. Some people are too superior to pray and regard meditation as far more exalted and more fitted to their high point of development. For me it has always been enough that Christ not only prayed but taught us the Lord's Prayer. To me, also, meditation is a mental process whereby one can acquire clear knowledge of divinity and awareness of the kingdom of souls, or the kingdom of God. It is the mode of the head and of the mind and is greatly needed by the unthinking people of the world. Prayer is of the emotional nature and of the heart and is universally used for the satisfaction of desire. Both should be used by the aspiring disciples of the world. Later I will touch upon Invocation which is the synthesis of the two.

Anyway, in this time of material need I - again as usual - stuck to prayer and that night I prayed. The next morning when I went out on to the porch I found there the needed cash and, within a day or two Foster Bailey got a letter from Mr. Ernest Suffern offering him a position in New York in connection with the T.S. of that city at a salary of $300 a month. He also offered to purchase a house for us in a small commuting-town across the Hudson. Foster accepted the offer and left for New York whilst I [180] stayed behind to see what the developments were and to take care of the children.

Living with me at that time was Augusta Craig, commonly called "Craigie" by all of us who knew and loved her. She lived with us off and on for many years and was greatly loved by me and the children. She was a unique person, rippling with wit and mentality. She never approached a problem in the ordinary way or from the ordinary angle. Perhaps this was because she had been four times married and had a vast experience of men and matters. She was one of the few people to whom I could go for advice because she and I so thoroughly understood each other. She had a caustic tongue and yet was so permeated with "It" that no matter where we were the postman, the milkman and the iceman, if unmarried, all tried to beguile her away from me. But she would have none of them. She decided life with me was interesting enough and she stuck with me until a few years before her death when she went into an old ladies' home in California, largely, she told me, because she had no use for old ladies. However, being an old lady and over 70 when she left me she thought they might profit from some of her experiences. I do not think she enjoyed the other ladies but she felt she was very good for them and I'll guarantee she was. She was always very good for me.

The time came at the end of 1920 when Foster wrote to me to join him in New York and I left the children in Craigie's care, knowing they would be safe, cared for and loved. I travelled to New York where Foster met me and took me to an apartment house in Yonkers, not far from the lodgings in which he was living. We married very shortly afterwards, going to the City Hall one morning, procuring a license, asking the man at the license bureau to recommend a clergyman for the marriage ceremony and [181] getting married at once. We returned to the office immediately for the afternoon's work and from that moment we have carried on for 26 years.

The next step was for us to furnish the house which Mr. Suffern purchased for us in Ridgefield Park, N. J., and then for Foster to go West and fetch the children. I stayed behind to get things ready, make the curtains, stock the house with necessities - most of which Mr. Suffern provided - and await anxiously for the return of my husband with the three girls. Craigie did not come with them; she followed later.

Never shall I forget their arrival at the Grand Central Terminal. Never did I see a more weary, worn out man than Foster Bailey. The four of them appeared up the ramp, Foster with Ellie in his arms and Dorothy and Mildred hanging on to his coat tails and how glad we all were to settle down in the new home. It was the first time the children had ever been East. They had never seen snow and had seldom worn shoes and it was for them like an entirely new civilized experiment. How he ever managed I do not know and I think this is a good place in which to point out what a marvelous stepfather he was to the children. He never allowed them whilst they were children to realize they were not his own and their indebtedness to him is very great. I think they are devoted to him and well they should be.

This entirely new cycle of living meant the adjustment of all of us to many changes. For the first time there was not only the intense pressure of the work to be done for people and for the Masters but it had to be combined with family cares, with the running of a household, with the education of the children and - which I found the most difficult - with the growing publicity. I have never been a lover of publicity. I've never liked the inquisitiveness of [182] the general public or their feeling that because you write books and lecture on the public platform that necessarily you have no private life. They seem to feel that anything you do is their business and that you must say the things they want said and portray yourself to them as they think you should be.

I shall never forget telling an audience of around 800 people, one day in New York, that all of them could attain a certain measure of spiritual realization if they cared enough to do so, but that it would entail sacrifice as it had in my own life. I told them that I had learned to iron the childrens clothes, etc., whilst reading a book on spiritual or occult matters and that it did not mean I burnt the clothes. I told them that they could regulate their thinking and learn mental concentration and spiritual orientation whilst peeling potatoes and shelling peas because that was what I had had to do, for I was no believer in sacrificing your family and their welfare to your own spiritual urges. At the close of the lecture a woman got up in the audience and publicly berated me for giving myself away to so many people on such trivial matters. I replied to her by telling her that I did not believe that the comfort of one's family was a trivial matter and that I had always had in my mind the work of a certain woman who was a well known lecturer and teacher but whose family of six children never saw her and the responsibility for their care was left to anybody who cared to be interested enough.

Personally I have no appreciation at all of the person who furthers a spiritual realization at the expense of their family or friends. There is far too much of this in various occult groups. When people come to me and tell me that their families are not sympathetic in their spiritual aspiration I ask them the following questions, - "Do you leave your occult books lying around to annoy everybody? Do [183] you demand complete silence in the house whilst you do your morning meditation? Do you make them get their own supper whilst you attend a meeting?" It is here that occult students make such fools of themselves and bring the whole question of occultism into disrepute. The spiritual life is not lived at the expense of others, and if people are suffering because you want to go to Heaven it is just too bad.

If there is one person in the world who makes me weary, tired and sick it is the academic, technical occultist. The second group that makes me tired are the nincompoops who think they are in touch with the Masters and who talk mysteriously of the communications they have received from the Masters. My attitude about all such communications is: "I believe this is what the Master says; I believe this is the teaching; but use your intuition; maybe it isn't." I may be considered by some as elusive as an eel but I do leave people free.

It was this contact with the general public that slowly began to start in 1921 and inaugurated a very difficult period in my life. I have always felt that I should astrologically have Cancer rising because I like to hide and not be seen and the verse in the Bible that has always seemed to me to be so important refers to "the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land."

Many of the leading astrologers have amused themselves by attempting to cast my horoscope. Most of them have given me Leo rising because they regard me as so individual. Only one of them has ever given me Cancer rising and he had insight and sympathy with my problem of publicity, and I think that inclined him to make Cancer my rising sign. However, I believe that my rising sign is Pisces. I have a Pisces husband and a Pisces daughter and Pisces is the sign of the medium or the mediator. I am not [184] a medium but I have been a kind of "middleman" between the Hierarchy and the general public. I would have you note that I say the general public and not occult groups. I know and believe that the general public is more ready for a sane knowledge of the Masters and more prepared for a normal and sensible interpretation of occult truth than are the members of the average occult group.

The children were now reaching the age where the normal physical care which engrosses the attention of the average mother was changing into emotional demands. This cycle which lasts until they are in their 'teens is an exceedingly difficult one - difficult for the children and frightfully difficult for the mothers. I am not at all sure that I reacted well or acted wisely and it is perhaps simply my good luck that today my daughters seem to like me. They all had a far more normal time in their upbringing than I ever had, left as I was to strangers, governess and masters and that, perhaps, made it difficult for me to understand them. I had a very exalted idea of what the relationship between mother and children should be. They had no such exalted idea. I was just somebody who could be expected to take care of them but who could also be expected to block what they wanted to do. I learnt a lot during this short cycle of years and have found it most valuable when it became a situation of helping other mothers to handle their problems. Looking back I don't honestly think that my children had a great deal of cause for disagreement with me for I honestly tried to understand and to be sympathetic but - taking it by and large - I am somewhat disgusted with the average parents in this country and in Great Britain.

Here in the United States we are so lax and lenient with our children that they have very little sense of responsibility or self discipline whilst in Great Britain the discipline [185] and parental demands and supervision and control are enough to make any child revolt. In both countries it works out exactly in the same way - revolt. Today the British young generation seems to me, from what I can gather, to be in a state of complete bewilderment as to what they want to do and what the younger generation should stand for in this world, whilst the shocking behavior of the G.I.s in the U. S. Army when over in Europe and elsewhere has been such that they have seriously damaged the prestige of the U. S. in the world. I do not blame the American boys, I blame their mothers, their fathers, their school teachers and their army officers, who have given them no sense of direction, no sense of responsibility and no true standard of living. It is certainly not entirely the boy's fault that so many of them went hay-wire during the war and when they went overseas.

When I was in Europe and Great Britain in the summer of 1946 I got direct first-hand information from the nationals in many countries as to their behavior; as to the tens of thousands of illegitimate children they left behind uncared for and unrecognized and as to the hundreds of girls they married and deserted. One of the most interesting things to me was to discover in what high esteem the negro troops were held for their courtesy and their niceness to the girls, taking no advantage of the girl unless the girl herself were willing. When I make this criticism of the American boys, and it is also somewhat true of the more disciplined British troops, I recognize, as I said several times in England to the people who were criticizing the G.I. boys to me, - "That's all very well, and I'm quite ready to believe that the American boys are all that you say, but what about the dirty little English and French and Dutch girls - for it takes two to play that game." Though our boys had too much money and were told by our officers to "take the [186] lid off " when on active service yet the girls of foreign nationality must also be held accountable. It is somewhat understandable that these starving girls and these underfed girls would choose to go with our American soldiers when it meant chicken and bread for their families. I say this is no excuse for them but I have to say it because it is a plain statement of fact.

This whole problem of sex and of the relationship between the sexes is perhaps one of the world problems which have to be solved within the next century. How it will be solved is not for me to say. I suppose it is largely the question of corrective education and of the instilling into young people in their later 'teens that the wages of sin is death. One of the cleanest men I ever knew who never in his life misconduct himself, as it is puritanically called, told me that the only reason was that at nineteen his father took him into a medical museum and showed him some of the results of misconduct. I'm no believer in the use of fear for the correction of behavior and weakness but it is possible that the material evidence of material wrongdoing has its value.

I have no intention of dealing at greater length with this subject but it has its bearing on the problem with which I was confronted when we settled down in the house at Ridgefield Park. I had to send my children to the public schools in New Jersey. I was accustomed to the idea of coeducation but only among an exclusive set of children all of whom were under ten years old. I, myself, was not the product of the coeducational system and was not at all sure I liked it for children who were nearing their 'teens but I had no alternative and I had to face the issue.

Given the right kind of home and given the right parental influence I know no better system than that of coeducation. The amazement of my own daughters when [187] they first arrived in England and found out how the English girls looked upon the English boys was almost funny. They found the English girls over-estimating the English boys, full of the mysteriousness of sex and not knowing in the least how to treat boys; whereas the American girl, brought up with boys every day, sitting in class with them, sharing luncheons, walking to and from school together, playing together on playing grounds had a much sounder and more wholesome attitude. I hope before long we shall see coeducation systems in every country in the world. But behind these systems must stand the home, complementing and off setting what the scholastic system lacks. Teaching boys and girls right relationship and responsibilities to each other, and giving them much freedom within the certain, mutually understood limits - a freedom based on trust - is essential.

The three girls started in the public school. I cannot say they ever distinguished themselves. Every year they made a grade but I do not remember their ever getting to the top of their class or getting honors. I do not regard this as any reflection on them. They all had fine minds and have proved to be highly intelligent citizens; but they just were not particularly interested. I remember Dorothy bringing me an editorial from the New York Times when she went into High School. The editorial was dealing with the modern educational system and pointing out its usefulness for the mass. It went on, however, to point out that the system broke down for the highly intelligent, creative or gifted child. "And that," said my daughter, "is us and that's why we don't make better grades at school." She was probably right but I took care not to let her know it. The trouble with mass coeducation is that the teachers have too large classes and no child can get proper attention. I remember asking Mildred one day why she was not doing her homework, "Well, mother," she said, "I have calculated [188] that as there are 60 children in my class it will be three weeks before the teacher gets around to me and I don't need to do anything at present." Anyway, they stewed away at school and got through each term and graduated normally and that was that. They were, however, great readers. They were constantly meeting interesting people, listening to interesting conversations and in touch, through Foster and myself with people all over the world, and their education, therefore, was really a very broad one.

All this time Foster was acting as secretary to the Theosophical Association of New York - an unofficial independent organization - and I was cooking, sewing, doing housekeeping and writing books at home. Every Monday morning Foster and I would get up at 5 o'clock and do the weekly wash including the sheets for there was little money coming in and it has been only within the last year or so of my life that I have been free of some of my housework.

Foster at this time organized the Committee of 1400 - a committee pledged to endeavor to swing the Theosophical Society to its original principles. This committee was in miniature a tiny replica of the major world cleavage which has climaxed since 1939 in the World War. It was essentially a fight between the reactionary, conservative forces in the Society and the new liberal forces which were working to see the original principles of the Society restored. It was a fight between a selective, isolationist, superior group who regarded themselves as wiser and more spiritual than the rest of the membership and those who loved their fellowmen, who believed in progress and the universality of truth. It was a fight between an exclusive faction and an inclusive group. It was not a fight of doctrines; it was a fight of principles and Foster spent much time organizing the fight. [189]

B.P.Wadia returned from India and we were at first hopeful that he would give strength to what we were trying to do. We found, however, that he planned to take over, if possible, the presidency of the T.S. in this country with the help of Foster and the Committee of 1400. Foster, however, had not organized in order to put into power a man who would represent the committee. The committee was organized to present the issues involved and the principles at stake to the membership of the T.S. When Wadia discovered that this was so he threatened to throw his interest and weight into the United Lodge of Theosophists, a rival and most sectarian organization. They represent the fundamentalist attitude in the T.S. along with one or two other Theosophical groups who represent the point of view of the orthodox theologian, holding that the last word was spoken by H.P.B., that there is nothing more to give out and that unless their interpretation of what H.P.B. said and meant was accepted one cannot be a good Theosophist. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that all these fundamentalist groups have remained very small.

The Committee of 1400 went ahead with its work. The next election took place, the membership named its choice (or rather the E.S. dictated its choice) and the work of the Committee, therefore, came to an end. Wadia threw his weight, as he had said he would, into the United Lodge of Theosophists, and eventually went back to India where he started one of the best magazines along occult lines extant today. It is called "The Aryan Path" and is exceedingly fine. The word Aryan here has nothing to do with Hitler's use of the word. It concerns the Aryan method of spiritual evaluation and the way in which people belonging to the Fifth Root Race make their approach to reality.

I, in the meantime, had started a Secret Doctrine class and had rented a room on Madison Avenue where we could [190] hold classes and see people by appointment. This Secret Doctrine class was started in 1921 and was exceedingly well-attended. People from the various Theosophical societies and occult groups came regularly. Mr. Richard Prater, an old associate of W.Q. Judge and a pupil of H.P.Blavatsky came to my class one day and the next week turned his entire Secret Doctrine class over to me.

I mention this for the benefit of United Lodge of Theosophists and for those who claim that the true Theosophical lineage descends from H.P.B. via W.Q. Judge. All the Theosophy that I knew had been taught me by personal friends and pupils of H.P.B. and this Mr. Prater recognized. Later he gave me the esoteric section instructions as given to him by H.P.B. They are identical with those I had seen when in the E.S. but they were given to me with no strings attached to them at all and I have been at liberty to use them at any time and have used them. When he died many years ago his theosophical library came into our hands with all the old Lucifers and all the old editions of the Theosophical magazine, plus other esoteric papers which he had received from H.P.B.

Among the papers which he gave me was one in which H.P.B. expressed her wish that the esoteric section should be called the Arcane School. It never was and I made up my mind that the old lady should have her wish and that was how the school came to get its name. I regarded it as a great privilege and happiness to know Mr. Prater.

Another old pupil of Madame Blavatsky and Col.Olcott, Miss Sarah Jacobs, gave me the photographic plates of the Masters' pictures which were given to her by Col. Olcott so that I have more than a happy feeling that the personal pupils and friends of H.P.Blavatsky approved of what I was setting out to do. I had their endorsement and their help until they passed over to the other side. They [191] were, naturally, all old people when I first met them. The attitude of the current Theosophical leaders and membership has always amused me. They have never approved of what I taught and yet what I taught came direct from personally trained pupils of H.P.B. and is more likely to be correct than that which has come from those who have not known her. I mention this because for the sake of the work I would like to have its sources recognized.

From the Secret Doctrine class arose groups of students all over the country who received the outlined lessons that I was giving to the class on Madison Avenue. These classes grew and prospered until they aroused definite Theosophical antagonism and I was warned by Dr. Jacob Bonggren that the classes were under attack. He was an old pupil of H.P.B. and his writings are to be found in the earlier magazines and I am very proud that he stood behind me in those earlier days.

In 1921 we formed a small meditation group of five men and my husband and myself who used to meet every Tuesday afternoon after business hours to talk about the things that mattered, to discuss the Plan of the Masters of the Wisdom and to meditate for awhile on our part in it. This group met steadily from the summer of 1922 until the summer of 1923. In the meantime I was continuing to write for the Tibetan and "Initiation Human & Solar," "Letters on Occult Meditation" and "The Consciousness of the Atom" had been printed.

People are apt to assume that if you write a book on such a technical subject as meditation that you know all about it. I began to get letters from all over the world from people asking me to teach them to meditate or to put them in touch with the Masters of the Wisdom. The latter request always amused me. I'm not one of those occult teachers who claims to know exactly what the Master [192] wants done or to have the right to introduce the curious and the dumb to the Masters. The Masters are not contacted that way. They are not the prey of the curiosity seeker, the gullible or the unintelligent. They can be found by the selfless server of the race and the intelligent interpreter of the truth but by no one else.

I have given out the teaching as it has come to me by the Tibetan but it is His responsibility. As a Master of the Wisdom He knows what I do not know and has access to records and truths which are sealed to me. The assumption that I know all that is given out in His books is a false one. As a trained disciple I may know more than the average reader but I have no knowledge such as that possessed by the Tibetan. He has vast knowledge and I frequently give a little chuckle when I hear myself described by some antagonistic Theosophist (I could mention names but I will not), as "the peculiar lady who keeps her ear at the keyhole of Shamballa." It will be a long time before I have earned that right "to enter into the place where the Will of God is known," and when I do I shall need no keyhole.

In the summer of 1922 I went away with the family for three months to Amagansett, Long Island, and undertook to write a letter once a week to the group of men to study and read during our absence. In many cases this letter seemed appropriate to send to those inquiring about meditation, about the way to God and about the spiritual plan for humanity, so we sent them copies of these letters as we wrote them. By the time we returned to New York in September 1922 it was necessary to consider in what way we could possibly handle the correspondence that was accumulating as a result of the increasing sales of the books and how to meet the demand for Secret Doctrine classes and how to handle all the appeals for help along spiritual [193] lines with which we were confronted. We, therefore, in April 1923, organized the Arcane School.

The four or five men associated with my husband and myself in the Tuesday afternoon class rallied around us. Two of them twenty-four years later are still working with us and two of them have passed over to the other side. We had not the faintest idea how to handle such work. We had none of us - with one exception - ever belonged to a correspondence school or knew anything about handling people by correspondence. All we had was good intention, a burning desire to be of some help, and three books on occult subjects. Since that time over 30,000 people have passed through the school. Many hundreds who joined the school, ten, twelve, or eighteen years ago are still with us and the work of the Arcane School is known and recognized in almost every country in the world except Russia and about four other countries.

Had we possessed the slightest indication as to the extensive and all-engrossing work ahead of us I question very much whether we should have had the courage to even make a start. Had I appreciated the headache and anxieties it would entail and the responsibilities any esoteric school has to shoulder I know I would not have attempted this work; but fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and I rushed.

I could have done none of this without the support and wisdom of my husband. I shudder to think of the mistakes I would have made, the errors in judgment of which I would have been capable and the legal end of it in which I would have found myself embroiled. His clear legal mind, his impersonality and his constant failure to get excited when I thought he should, has saved me constantly from myself.

It is not an easy thing to run an esoteric school. It is [194] far from easy to take the responsibility to teach people true meditation. It is difficult to tread the narrow, razor-edged path which leads between the higher psychism, or spiritual perception, and the lower psychism which many people share with the cats and dogs. It is not easy to discriminate between a psychic hunch and an intuitive perception and then, also, take hold of peoples' lives spiritually, when they voluntarily put themselves into your hands for training, and give them what is needed. None of this would have been possible for me to the extent it has been had it not been for the wonderful help given by the workers at Headquarters and the student-secretaries out in the field. We started with one room. We now (1947) have two floors at 11 West 42nd Street with a very large staff of workers, with Headquarters in England also and in Holland, Italy and Switzerland. Today, apart from the Headquarters Staff we have a group of 140 secretaries, senior students who help in the instruction of the other students. These secretaries are scattered all over the world and it is owing to their disinterested and voluntary help given steadily over the years that we are able to keep the work going.

When the work started there were certain basic principles which we were determined should govern all the activities of this group. I am anxious to make these clear because I think they are fundamental and should govern all esoteric schools and because after I am dead and gone I want to feel that these principles will still determine policies. The basic training given in the Arcane School is that which has been given down the ages to disciples. The Arcane School, if it is successful, will not therefore in this century at least have a large membership. Those ready to be trained in the spiritual laws which govern all disciples are rare indeed, though we can look for an increasing number. The Arcane School is not a school for probationary [195] disciples. It is intended to be a school for those who can be trained to act directly and consciously under the Masters of the Wisdom. There are in the world today many schools for probationers and they are doing great and noble and necessary work.

It was for a long time the cause of great bewilderment to me why the T.S. and particularly the E.S. members were so bitterly antagonistic to the work which I was trying to do. I knew it was not due to our earlier activities in the society and that it was based on something else and that puzzled me. It had seemed to me and still does that there is room in the world today for hundreds of true esoteric schools and that they all should be able to work in cooperation with each other, supplementing each other and helping each other.

I puzzled over this for a long time and then in Paris in the early 1930s I asked Mr. Marcault, then the head of the T.S. in France, what it was all about. He looked at me with blank astonishment and said that they naturally objected to my not putting people into the E.S. instead of into my own group. I looked at him with equal astonishment and told him that in the Arcane School we had four different brands of Theosophists, four different kinds of Rosicrucians and that not one of them wanted to join the T.S. of which he and I were members. I reminded him that no one was admitted into the E.S. unless they had been for two years members of the T.S. and I asked him why people who were ready for esoteric training should be kept waiting for two years in some purely exoteric group. He had no answer to this and I increased his bewilderment by pointing out (which I now see was not exactly tactful of me) what a pity it was that the Arcane School and the esoteric section could not work happily together. I pointed out that the E.S. was the best school for probationers in the world as it fed the fires of aspiration and nurtured devotion in its membership [196] but that we were a school for training people to be "accepted disciples" - that is, those on the last stages of the probationary path and that our emphasis was impersonality and mental development. I added that we made our work deliberately eliminative, only keeping those who would really work hard and who showed signs of true mental culture. I told him that we dropped hundreds of the emotional, devotional type and that if only we could work together I could have passed many of these people on to the E.S. He was neither impressed nor pleased and I cannot say that I blamed him. It was not that I meant to be derogatory in my statement for to my mind both groups are equally needed; both can serve a spiritual purpose and whether one is a probationer or a disciple one is still a spiritually oriented human being requiring training and discipline.

This idea of status and position has been the curse of the T.S. and many occult groups. Often have I said to the school secretaries that the fact that they have seniority in the A.S. need be no indication of spiritual development and that they may have in their group of students a beginner who is way ahead of them on the Path of Discipleship. Why people should think that an emotional, strong feeling, sentient, perceptive person is less important than the mental type is another thing that has bewildered me. Nobody can exist without their heart or their head and the true occult student is a combination of both. No Arcane School member is permitted, by the heads of the T.S. to belong to the E.S. without relinquishing affiliation with us. This is all wrong and part of the great heresy of separateness.

We require no such separation and we tell the students that if the School succeeds in deepening their spiritual life in widening their horizon and in increasing their mental perception it is up to them to work it out in the church, society, organization or group, the home or community in [197] which their lot is cast. Because of this we have active students who are members of the various theosophical organizations, each of which regards itself as the only true one. We have students belonging to four different groups of Rosicrucians. We have church members, Catholic and Protestant, Christian Scientists, Unity people and members of almost every possible organization which has a spiritual or religious basis. We take people who have no beliefs at all but who are willing to accept an hypothesis and attempt to prove its worth. The Arcane School is therefore non-sectarian, non-political, but deeply international in its thinking. Service is its keynote. Its members can work in any sect and any political party provided that they remember that all paths lead to God and that the welfare of the one humanity governs all their thinking. Above everything else, this is a school in which a student is taught that the souls of men are one.

I would like to add, also, that this is a school wherein belief in the spiritual Hierarchy of our planet is scientifically taught, not as a doctrine but as an existent and demonstrable kingdom in nature. There has been much church teaching given about the kingdom of God and the kingdom of souls. These are but terms for the phrase used above, the Spiritual Hierarchy of the planet.

It is a school wherein true, occult obedience is developed. This occult obedience involves no obedience to me or any other head of the School or to any human being. No oaths of allegiance or personal pledges to any individual are requested or exacted from students in the Arcane School. They are taught, however, prompt obedience to the dictates of their own soul. As the voice of that soul gets increasingly familiar it will eventually make them members of the Kingdom of God and bring them face to face with Christ.

So in 1923 we started a school that was non-doctrinal, [198] non-sectarian and based on the Ageless Wisdom that has come down to us from the very night of time. We started a school which had a definite purpose and a specific objective - a school which was inclusive and not exclusive and that oriented its students toward a life of service as the road of approach to the Hierarchy instead of the road of selfish, spiritual self-culture. We determined that the work should be hard and stiff and difficult so the non-intelligent would be eliminated. One of the easiest things in the world to do is to start a self-interest occult school and it is being done all the time, but we wanted nothing of that kind.

Little by little we learned how to organize the work and how to train the staff and how to systematize the records and take those businesslike methods that would insure our students being promptly serviced. We have kept the school on a voluntary basis financially and make no charge for the work. In this way we are under no obligation, financially, to the students and I feel free to drop a student any time if he is not profiting by what we do. We have no "angel" back of the work and no large donor of any kind. The work is supported by the small subscriptions of the many, which is very much sounder and more dependable.

I think this is all I have to tell you about the inception of the school and its functioning. It is the very heart of all we do. We now have a British section, a Dutch section, an Italian section, a Swiss section and a South American section with organized work in Turkey and West Africa and members scattered in many other countries. The school papers go out in many languages and the students in these countries are handled by secretaries who speak their language. The service activities extend into an even wider field and I shall not attempt to deal with them here.

The next six years, from 1924 to 1930, are somewhat monotonous. As I look over them I am profoundly conscious [199] of a cycle in which day after day, week after week, month after month, I did the same thing as I continued to develop the Arcane School. I was continuously writing school papers and articles. I was eternally seeing people by appointment and by 1928 I was often seeing people every twenty minutes right through the day. I never flattered myself that this was because I was such a wonderful person. It was largely because I made no charge.

These were the years in which every kind of psychologist was lecturing up and down the land. Every type of psychoanalyst was giving appointments and charging heavily for them. I never made any charge and my days were full of seeing people who had some problem or other and hoped I could solve it. There was one woman in New York at that time who charged $500 for a half hour appointment and she had a waiting list. I'll guarantee that she never gave as useful advice as I gave for nothing.

One of the mysteries of human nature emerged most definitely into my consciousness at this time. I discovered that people were perfectly willing to talk about the most intimate affairs in their daily lives, revealing their sex relations with their husbands or their wives to me - a perfect stranger. I suppose my reaction against this was based upon my British background for we here in America have always talked more freely to strangers than has ever been the custom with the other half of the Anglo Saxon race. Candidly, I've never liked it. There is a certain reticence which is useful and right, and I have always realized that when people have been too frank with one and have given themselves away in intimate conversation they generally end by hating you - a type of hatred that is not warranted or merited by the person in whom they have confided. I've never been interested in the sex relations of people but I realize that it is a major factor in individual harmony. [200]

This whole question of sex is today in a fluid condition. I am myself a conservative Britisher, with a horror of divorce, with a dislike of sex discussions but I do know, however, that the modern generation is not entirely wrong. I do know that the Victorian attitude was rotten and pernicious. Their secrecy and the mystery they aroused around the whole problem of sex was a dangerous thing in an innocent group of young people in creative natural living. The whispers, the secrets, the communications behind locked doors raised inquiries among young people and resulted in dirtiness in their thinking and is something difficult to forgive in the Victorian father and mother. Today we are suffering from the reaction to this. It is almost possible that young people know too much, but I personally believe it to be a far safer condition than the one in which I was raised.

Just what is the solution of the sex problem of the races I do not know. I do know that under British law in foreign countries and presumably Dutch and any other laws, a man who is a Mohammedan may have a plurality of wives. Men of every nation, American, British or any other nation have always had plurality of contacts. Out of all this promiscuity and out of all this searching for an answer some true solution will eventually emerge. The French haven't got it, for with the French nation there is the demonstration that "the mind is the slayer of the real." They are such realists that the beautiful, spiritual, subjective thing is often forgotten and this indicates a great lack in the French equipment. Their Senate assembles without any recognition of Deity; their Masonic orders are outlawed by the Grand Lodges of other countries because they recognize no Grand Architect of the Universe and their planned sex relationships are based upon a purely utilitarian [201] concept which is basically sound provided there is nothing in the world but material living.

Today, in 1947, the world is sex mad. Great Britain, the U.S., and all other countries are riddled by divorce procedures; young people marry on the basis that if the union is not a happy one it can be dissolved, and who shall say they are wrong? Illegitimate children as a result of the war psychosis in every country are almost the rule and not the exception. Wherever marching armies march hundreds of thousands of illegitimate children are the result. The church fulminates against the modern view of marriage and its disillusion but offers no solution, and both the Catholic and Episcopal churches of the U.S. and Great Britain hold the view that if a divorce is procured any later marriage is adultery.

I remember so well in this connection wishing to attend a communion service in the early mornings at a little church at Tunbridge Wells which was close to our headquarters in that town. I went to the rector and asked permission because England is a very small country and my people are very well known. The rector said he would have to get permission of the Bishop and this permission was refused and the rector came and told me I could not go to communion. I looked at the rector for a few minutes and then I said, "I could have come to this town from America and be the cocktail drinking, card-playing woman, fast and with half a dozen lovers and I could have gone to communion because I had had no divorce. Twenty years ago I got a divorce with the full approval of the Bishop and clergy in the diocese because they knew the facts, but I cannot attend communion - I, who have sought to serve the Christ since I was fifteen." There is something fundamentally wrong with the Church of England. There is something equally wrong with the Episcopal Church here because a bishop of this [202] church said to me once, "Don't ever tell me that a person is divorced because what I do not know hurts nobody, but if I know then I shall have to refuse communion." No comment.

We are on our way towards the solution of the sex problem. What it will be I do not know, but I trust in the inherent soundness of humanity and the unfolding purpose of God. Maybe the solution will come through right education in our schools and the right attitude of the parents in the world towards their adolescent boys and girls. The present attitude is based on fear, ignorance and reticence. The time must come when educators and parents talk out the facts of life and the regulation of the sexes openly and directly with the young people, and I see that time most rapidly approaching. The young people are very sound but their ignorance frequently gets them into difficulties. If they know the facts - the brutal, unadorned facts - they will know what to do. All this silly talk about little flowers and seed-pods and babies coming via the stork and similar approaches to the sex problem, and they are many, are an insult to the human intelligence and our young people are most highly intelligent.

Personally, I would like to see every boy and girl at the age of adolescence taken to an understanding physician and told the bald facts. I would like to have engendered in the younger generation a respect for their function as the coming parents for the next generation and I would like to have the mother and father of today (and here I am generalizing) leave the young people more free to work out their own problems. My experience has been that they can be trusted when they know. The average boy and girl are not naturally degenerate and are not going to take risks when they know the risks exist. I would like to have the sex problem approached by the physician as he talks to the boys and [203] girls as they are brought to him from the angle of parenthood, from the point of view of the dangers of promiscuity plus a warning as to homosexuality, which is one of the greatest menaces confronting the boys and girls today. Given the facts and given a clear picture, as a general rule we can trust our young people but, candidly, I do not trust the parents largely because they are full of fear and do not trust their children.

All this is in the nature of a preliminary canter because during the next few years I naturally had to face the boy and girl problem. I have three most attractive daughters and the boys began to gather around so that it was not only people, people, people all the time in my office but it was boy, boy, boy all the time in my home and it was there I learned to understand and like both groups. I respect, like and trust the younger generation.

About this time we moved from Ridgefield Park to Stamford, Conn. A friend of ours, Mr. Graham Phelps-Stokes, had a vacant house on Long Island Sound and he let us have it rent free for several years. It was a much larger and nicer house than the one in Ridgefield Park and personally I loved it. I shall always remember the mornings there. Upstairs there was a wing of the house which consisted of one large room over the maid's quarters downstairs. There were windows on three sides of this room and there I lived and worked. Craigie was with us and although there was an awful lot of housework to be done the girls were getting older and were much more helpful in the house. Foster and I used to commute to New York most days of the week as Craigie was there to look after the girls. They were all in their 'teens and extraordinarily good looking and we found it quite impossible to put them into a public school. The population of Stamford at that time was largely foreign and three beautiful blond girls were [204] almost irresistible to the Italian boy so they were followed everywhere. I laid the problem before a rich friend of mine and she paid for their tuition in the Low Hayward School. This was a very high class girls' private school, and they attended there every day until we left Stamford.

I cannot remember all the different boys that gathered around. Two of them are still our friends and visit us at times though they are both married and have their families. They drop in now at intervals and somehow there is always that happy, deeply rooted situation which eliminates all strain and enables us to pick up the threads of a close friendship no matter how long it has been since we last saw them. The others I forget. They came and they went. An outstanding recollection is sitting up nights in my room with three sides of glass, watching for the lights of the car that would indicate that a boy was returning a girl to her home. This used to annoy my daughters extremely but I have always felt that the psychology was good. Mother was always aware where her girls were, who they were with and when they got home and I have never regretted my stubbornness on this point. But I often regretted my lost hours of sleep. The three girls never gave me any real anxiety and never gave me any cause to distrust them, but I like to take this opportunity, now they are all married and living their own lives, to say how nice they were, how sound, how sensible and how downright decent.

So the years slipped away. From 1925 to 1930 were years of adjustments, of difficulties, of joys and of growth. There is little to relate. They were just ordinary years - years of work, establishing and stabilizing the Arcane School, of publishing the Tibetan's books and of gathering around us a group of men and women who were not only our staunch friends, working with us from then to now, but were also loyally dedicated to the service of humanity. [205]

We seldom went away in the summer as this house was on the Sound and had its own beach and the girls had all the swimming and clamming they needed. I'm really a great hand at clam chowder. Thanks to the kindness of a friend, we had a car and could drive to New York or anywhere we chose. Every Sunday, practically, we were at home to friends and guests and frequently had 20 or 30 people at the house. We mixed them all up higgledy-piggledy, young and old, people of good social position or of no position, and I believe a good time was had by all. We served cake and punch, tea and coffee, and no matter who they were everybody had to "muck in" and wash dishes and tidy up the sitting room when the day was over.

We had a cat and a dog who were exceedingly individual. The dog was a police dog, grandson of Rin Tin Tin and most valuable. He was supposed to be a protection to us and to scare tramps and bums away but he was no protection whatsoever. He loved everybody and welcomed every bum to the house. He was overbred, far too sensitive and highly strung and had to have bromides constantly to keep his nerves in order. There was not a streak of viciousness in him and we all adored him. The cat nobody adored because it adored only me. It was a huge and quite magnificent Tom cat that we picked up as a stray when it was a wee kitten. It would speak to nobody but me. It would accept food from nobody but me. It refused to enter the house if I were not downstairs so at last Foster built it a ladder from the garden to my bedroom window and cut a hole in the screen so that he could get into my room and from that moment it was entirely happy, never using any door, but always shooting up the ladder on to my bed.

The work was growing apace during these years. My husband had started the magazine, The Beacon, and it was meeting a real need as it does today. I usually put on 6 or 8 [206] public lectures a year and as long as no paid admissions were asked I could easily get out an audience of 1000. In time, however, we decided that a lot of these people who occupied chairs in my audiences were what is called in New York simply floaters. They drifted in and out of every free lecture, no matter what the subject was, and never really benefited from anything they heard. The time, therefore, came when we decided to charge admission to my lectures even if it was only 25 cents. The audiences immediately dropped about half and this pleased us greatly. Those who came did so because they wanted to hear and learn and it was worth while talking to them.

I have always liked lecturing and for the last twenty years have never known what it is to feel nervous on the platform. I like people and trust them and an audience is simply a nice person. I suppose lecturing is the thing I enjoy the most in the world and today, because prevented by my health, it is one of the greatest deprivations. My doctor does not really sanction it and my husband worries dreadfully so I only lecture now at the yearly conference.

It was early in this period that I established a friendship which has meant to me more than anything else in the world except my marriage to Foster Bailey. This friend was simplicity and sweetness and selflessness combined, and she brought a richness and a beauty into my life of which I had never dreamed. Seventeen long years we walked the spiritual way together. I gave her all the spare time I could and was constantly at her home. The same things amused us; the same qualities and ideas interested us. We had no secrets from each other and I knew all that she felt about people and circumstances and her environment. I like to think that in the last seventeen years of her lonely life she was not entirely alone. To understand her, to stand by her, to let her talk to me freely and to feel safe in so doing [207] was the only compensation I could make to her for her endless goodness to me. For seventeen years she dressed me and until her death in 1940 I never bought an article of clothing for myself. I'm still wearing the clothes she gave me. All the jewelry I have she gave me. I brought beautiful lace and jewelry to this country when I came but it all had to be sold to pay the grocer's bills and she saw to it that some of it was replaced. She put the girls through school and always paid our passages to Europe and Great Britain and back. We were so close that if I was ill she knew it automatically. I remember once being ill in England some years ago and within a few hours she cabled me £500 as she knew I was ill and might need it.

Our telepathic relationship has been quite extraordinary and has continued even after her death. When things were happening in her own family after she had passed over she would discuss them with me telepathically. Although I had no means of knowing about them, later I would discover what it was all about and I am quite frequently even today in touch with her. She had a very deep and profound knowledge of the Ageless Wisdom but she was afraid of people; afraid of being misunderstood; afraid that people liked her for her money and basically and deeply afraid of life. I think I was of service to her along these lines, for she respected my judgment and found it often coincided with hers. I acted as a safety-valve. She knew she could tell me anything and that it would go no further. Even when she was dying she had me on her mind and only a few days before her death I had a letter from her which I could scarcely read, telling me about herself. The letter was mailed for her by someone. One of the things that I am looking forward to when I pass over to the other side is to find her waiting for me, for that she has promised to do. We had good times together whilst she was on earth. We chuckled [208] and laughed over the same things. We liked the same colors and I have often wondered what I did in the past to deserve such a friend in the present.

Twice a year she would go to a store and buy me eight or nine dresses, knowing exactly the kind of thing I liked and the colors that suited me and twice a year on receipt of these boxes of beautiful clothes I would go to my cupboard and take out an equivalent number of the dresses of the year before and send them to personal friends who I knew were hard up. I'm no believer in hoarding things for oneself and I have known what it is to need a certain type of dress or coat and not be able to afford it. The poverty among the better class of people who have to keep up certain appearances is a far more bitter experience than many other types of poverty. They do not like to accept charity and they cannot go around and beg but they can be induced to accept what they need from anyone, for instance, who could write and say as I could write and say, 'I've just had a present of a lot of new dresses and I simply can't wear all I have. I would feel greedy if I held on to all of them, so I am sending you a couple of them and you can help me out by accepting them." All this happiness, therefore, which nice and correct clothes can bring could every year be traced to this friend and not to me.

I find it difficult to talk as I would like to talk about the people who matter the most to me. I feel this particularly in this case and, above all, in the case of Foster Bailey, my husband. He and I have talked this over and decided it would not be possible to put into an autobiography what I would like to say.

Another interesting friendship also came our way and had in it some very significant implications - implications that are more liable to work out in the next life than this. There is a club in the City of New York that is called the [209] Nobility Club. One day a member of the club asked me to go down and hear the Grand Duke Alexander speak. He was a son of one of the Czars of Russia and brother-in-law of the late Czar Nicholas. I went down more from curiosity than from anything else and found a packed room filled with all the elite of the nobility and royalties gathered in New York at that time. Presently we all got to our feet when the Grand Duke came in and sat down in an armchair on the platform. When we were all again seated he looked us all over very seriously and then said, "I wonder if it is possible that for one minute you would forget that I am a Grand Duke, because I want to talk to you about your souls." I sat up startled and pleased and at the dose of his talk I turned to my friend, Baroness..., and said, "How I would like to put the Grand Duke in touch with people in this country who won't care whether he is a Grand Duke or not but will love him for himself and his message." That was all and I thought no more about it.

The next morning, when in my office, the telephone rang and a voice said, "His Imperial Highness will be glad if Mrs. Bailey will be at the Ritz at 11 o'clock." So Mrs. Bailey was over at the Ritz at 11. I was met in the foyer by the Grand Duke's secretary. He sat me down and looked solemnly at me and said, "What do you want with the Grand Duke, Mrs. Bailey?" Amazed, I looked at him and said, "Nothing. I can't imagine why I am here." "But," said Mr. Roumanoff, "the Grand Duke said you wanted to see him." I then told him I had taken no steps to see the Grand Duke and that I could not imagine what he wanted me for. I told him I had been to the Grand Duke's talk the afternoon before and had expressed to a friend of mine the wish that he could meet certain people. Mr. Roumanoff then took me upstairs to the Grand Duke's suite and after I had made my curtsey and been seated he asked me what [210] he could do for me. I said, "Nothing." I then went on to tell him that there were people in America, like Mrs. du Pont Ortiz, who thought as he did, who had beautiful homes, who seldom attended lectures and that I hoped that he might perhaps be willing to meet them. Whereupon he assured me that he would do anything I asked him and then said, "Let us now talk about the things that matter." We spent about an hour talking about things spiritual and the need for love in the world. He had just published a book called "The Religion of Love" and was anxious to have it more widely read.

When I got back to the office I called up Alice Ortiz and told her to come up to New York and put on a luncheon for the Grand Duke at the Hotel Ambassador. She promptly refused. I, as promptly, coaxed her into consenting. She came up and gave a luncheon party. In the middle of the lunch Mr. Roumanoff turned to me and said, "Who are you, Mrs. Bailey? We cannot find out anything about you." I assured him I was not surprised, because I was nobody - just an American citizen with a British background. He shook his head and seemed quite bewildered, telling me that the Grand Duke had said that he would like to do what I wanted him to do.

This was the beginning of a very real friendship which lasted until the Grand Duke died and after. He constantly went down with Foster and me to stop at Valmy for a few days. All of us had long, interesting talks. One of the things I feel we both deeply realized in that friendship was that under the skin we are all alike, and that whether you are of royal blood or the lowest type of human being socially, we have the same likes and dislikes, the same pains and sorrows, the same sources of happiness and the same urge to go forward spiritually. The Grand Duke was a convinced spiritualist and we used to have quite entertaining [211] times holding little seances in Alice's huge  living-room.

One afternoon Mr. Roumanoff called my husband up, asking if my husband and I were free that evening and if so would we be responsible for taking the Grand Duke to the two places where he had to speak. We were glad to do so and took him where he had to go and at the close of his talk rescued him from the autograph hunters. On the way back to the hotel the Grand Duke suddenly turned to me and said, "Mrs. Bailey, if I were to tell you that I also know the Tibetan would it mean anything to you?" "Yes, sir," I said, "it would mean a great deal." "Well, now," replied the Grand Duke, "you understand the triangle, you, Foster and me." This was, I think, the last time I saw him. He left shortly after that for the south of France and we left for England.

A couple of years later I was sitting up in bed one morning reading about 6.30, when in walked the Grand Duke, to my amazement, in the dark blue lounging pajamas which he so often wore. He looked at me, smiled, waved his hand and disappeared. I went to Foster and told him that the Grand Duke was dead. And so it was. I saw the obituary notice in next day's papers. Before he left America he had given me a photograph of himself, autographed, of course, and after a year or so this disappeared. It completely vanished and as he was no longer alive I deeply regretted it but was confident that some autograph hunter had stolen it. Several years later, walking down 43rd St., New York, I suddenly saw the Grand Duke coming towards me. He smiled and passed on and when I got up to my office I found the lost photograph lying on my desk. There was evidently quite a close link upon the spiritual level between the Grand Duke, Foster Bailey and myself. In a later life we shall know the reason for the contact this life and for the friendship and understanding that were established. [212]

A life must not be seen as an isolated event but as an episode in a series of lives. What is working out today, the friends and family we are linked with and the quality, character and temperament which we show indicates simply the sum total of the past. What we are in our next life results from what we have been and done in this.

These years were very busy years. The girls were growing up and the boys were coming around. The School was steadily growing and inside myself I was gaining a sense of assurance and a recognition that I had found the work about which K.H. had spoken to me in 1895. The doctrines of reincarnation and of the law of cause and effect had solved the problems of my questioning mind. The Hierarchy was known to me. I had been given the privilege of contacting K.H. when I chose, for I could now be trusted to keep my personality affairs out of His Ashram and I moved on into greater usefulness in His Ashram and, consequently, in the world. The recognition of the Tibetan's books throughout the world was steadily growing. I, myself, had written several books which met with a good reception and I wrote them to prove that one could do so-called psychic work, such as my work with the Tibetan, and still possess one's own set of brains and be an intelligent human being. Through the books and through the growing membership of the School, Foster and I were coming increasingly in contact with people all over the world. Letters came pouring in of inquiry, of requests for help, or with a demand that we start a group in some country or other.

I have always held the theory that the deepest and most esoteric truths could be shouted from the housetops to the general public and unless there was an inner mechanism of spiritual recognition no harm could possibly be done. Therefore pledges to secrecy became meaningless. There are no secrets. There is only the presentation of truth and its [213] understanding. There has been a great deal of confusion in the minds of the general public between esotericism and magic. Magic is a mode of working on the physical plane relating substance and matter, energy and force in order to create forms through which life can express itself. This work as it deals with elemental forces is dangerous and even the pure in heart need protection. Esotericism is in reality the science of the soul. It concerns the living, spiritual, vital principle found in every form. It establishes a unity both in time and space. It motivates and implements the Plan from the angle of the aspirant and is the science of the Path, and it instructs man in the techniques of the coming superman and thus enables him to set his feet upon the Path of the higher evolution.

The curriculum of the School was gradually unfolded. We kept the work, and still keep it, fluid in an effort to meet the changing needs and we were gradually acquiring a staff of trained men to superintend the work. Fifteen years ago (in 1928) we moved to our present headquarters and today both the 31st and the 32nd floors constitute the headquarters of the Arcane School, of the Lucis Trust, of the Goodwill Work and of the Lucis Publishing Company. Beginning with a small handful of students we now have a number of spiritual projects all occupied with the service of humanity and all of them non-profit and world wide, and all made possible by the students in the Arcane School. [214]

Chapter VI

The year 1930 marks the last year of what I call normal living. From that time on I became absorbed in work both in Europe and Great Britain as well as in the U.S. and also in the girls' engagements and marriages, which, curiously enough, took a good deal out of me emotionally. The somewhat normal rhythm of my life from 1924 to 1930 was definitely disrupted in 1931.

These six years were in many ways years of monotonous rhythm and routine - getting up in the morning, working for the Tibetan, seeing that the girls were up and ready for school, breakfast, ordering the groceries, catching the train for New York in order to be in my office by ten and then the monotony of constant appointments, handling my mail, dictating letters, making decisions in relation to the work of the school, discussing problems with Foster and going out to lunch. Often in the late afternoon there were classes and I look back to those times in which I taught the fundamentals of the Secret Doctrine as some of the most profitable and satisfactory times in my life.

In many ways today H.P.B.'s book The Secret Doctrine is out of date and its approach to the Ageless Wisdom has little or no appeal to the modern generation. But those of us who really studied it and arrived at some understanding of its inner significance have a basic appreciation of the truth that no other book seems to supply. H.P.B. said that the next interpretation of the Ageless Wisdom would be a psychological approach, and A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, which I published in 1925, is the psychological key to The Secret Doctrine. None of my books would have been possible [215] had I not at one time made a very close study of The Secret Doctrine.

Looking back over the years of my own girlhood and those of my daughters, I know now what a difficult time adolescence is. I had a much worse time than my girls did because nobody told me anything. They had a difficult enough time but God knows I had worse. I had to stand by and see them chased and hope they would not be taken in; sometimes they were. I had to suffer at their hands by being temporarily regarded as an out-of-date parent. I had to submit to having my views regarded as obsolete and try to remember my own days of revolt. I had seen so much and knew so much of the evils in the world that I suffered agonies of terror over them, all of which proved totally unnecessary but which were bad enough at the time. I had to submit to their youthful belief that I knew nothing about sex, that I did not know how to handle men, that nobody had ever been in love with me except the two men I had married. My experience, of course, was that of every parent who launches young people on to the world, particularly if they are launching daughters. Sons free themselves earlier and keep their mouths shut, and the average mother knows nothing about her son's affairs. The next seven or eight years were, therefore, difficult ones for me and I am not at all sure that I handled them wisely. Anyway, I have apparently done no great harm and I rest back upon that.

In the fall of 1930 it was apparent that the work of the school was growing in Europe and Great Britain. The books that we had published were finding their way all over the world and through them we were coming into touch with people in every country. Many of these people would join the Arcane School, and the majority of them spoke English. At this time we had none of our work in foreign languages nor had we any foreign-speaking secretaries. The knowledge [216] of what we were doing and standing for spread all over the world mainly through the books and through people who wrote in to us about meditation or in connection with some problem or other.

Members of the Theosophical Society who were discontented with the narrowness of the presentation also got in touch with us and many of them joined the Arcane School. When they made application to do so I always pointed out to them that we personally had no objection to their affiliating with us but that the heads of the E.S. of that society most definitely objected. Rightly or wrongly I always pointed out to them that their souls were their own and that they should accept dictation from no one, either from me or the heads of the E.S. The result of this has been that we have in the Arcane School today many of the oldest and best of the E.S. members who find nothing contradictory in the two lines of approach.

The ridiculous theory, promulgated by the E.S. that it is dangerous to follow two lines of meditation at once, has not only amused me but has always proven wrong. For one thing, the same quality and vibration runs through the two approaches and, for another, the meditation work assigned in the E.S. is so elementary that it has little if any effect on the centers. It is, however, exceedingly good for those on the Path of Probation.

The Arcane School was, therefore, growing quite steadily but was still relatively small. We had moved from one location to another according to the vicissitudes of renting in New York City and it was in April 1928 that we first moved into our present headquarters at 11 West 42nd Street. We were among the first to move into this new building and to occupy the top floor, the 32nd. Today we occupy the 31st floor also but our quarters are much too [217] cramped and we shall have to expand in some way before long.

We had been in correspondence for some little while with a woman in Switzerland who had a good deal of knowledge and who was interested in what we were teaching and in doing something to reach the world with the Ageless Wisdom. She had a beautiful home on Lake Maggiore in Switzerland where she had built a lecture hall and accumulated a very good library. One day in the fall of 1930 she turned up late one night at our home in Stamford, Connecticut, and spent a little time with us there, talking over many things, laying her various ideas before us, finding out what was our point of view and offering herself as a collaborator with us. She suggested the idea that with our help she should start a spiritual center at Ascona near Locarno on Lake Maggiore and that it should be undenominational, non-sectarian and open to esoteric thinkers and occult students of all groups in Europe and elsewhere. She had these lovely houses, this lecture hall and these beautiful grounds which would be her contribution, and Foster and I should go there and start the project and lecture and teach. She offered us full hospitality and was willing to have the three girls accompany us if we went to Ascona, offering board and lodging to all of us, but not our travelling expenses.

We naturally could make no sudden decision but promised her we would think the matter over most carefully and would let her know soon after the New Year of 1931.

There were many problems involved. The travelling expenses of five people were no light item and we were not at all sure that we wanted to undertake such an enterprise on such conditions. I had been twenty years in America without going to Europe. I could not go to Europe without [218] visiting my own country and there were many considerations before we knew exactly what was right.

My friend, Alice Ortiz, at this time came to me with a proposition which had a bearing on the whole situation. Without knowing anything about the proposal of Olga Fröbe, she said to me one day, "Which would you prefer for your girls, that I should send them to college for several years, or would you prefer to have them travel abroad? I will defray either expense, but you must do what you think best for the girls." I talked it over most carefully with Foster and we decided that foreign travel was much more useful and broadening for the girls than any college degree. Anybody can get a college degree but few people could travel widely. I suppose I was influenced in this decision because I had traveled so much myself and also had had no degrees.

Only twice have I been sorry that I had had no college degree. Such degrees are frightfully overrated in this country and though I have no degrees I know I am as well educated as those who have. Not so many years ago I was asked to give a series of lectures at The Postgraduate College in Washington, D.C. I was to speak on the intellect and the intuition. The announcements were printed and sent out by the college, but when they discovered I had no degrees after my name, they proceeded to cancel the lectures. I later received a letter from the president of the college indicating that the faculty believed a mistake had been made but that it was too late for them to do anything. Shortly after I was asked by Cornell University to go there and meet the students and speak to them on the modern spiritual approach to truth and to talk to little groups of students. This was also cancelled because I had no college degrees.

Anyhow, my attitude was that the girls would learn to be more useful human beings if they got to know more about [219] people in other continents, not by visiting monuments and galleries but by getting to know the people themselves, so we gave up all idea of an academic college training for the girls and launched them into the college of life.

Looking back over our decision, I have never regretted that the girls did not go to college. They have learned to know human beings and to realize that the U.S.A. is not the one and only country in the world. They discovered that there were just as nice people, just as intelligent people, just as bad people, just as good people in Great Britain, Switzerland, France, etc., as there are in the United States.

The thing we have to develop in the world today is the world citizen and bring to an end this crude nationalism which has been the source of so much world hate. I know nothing more pernicious than the slogan "America for the Americans." I know nothing more insular than the habit of the British to regard all others as foreigners, or the belief of the French that the French are the leaders in all civilized movements. All that sort of thing has to go. I find the same people in the many countries in which I have lived. Some countries may be more physically comfortable than others but the humanity in that country is the same.

I suppose as I have gone through city after city in the States, Great Britain and on the Continent and have listened to what the different people say about each other and the way they disparage each other and deride each other and despise each other I have noticed it more than most people do, and it was the sense of the oneness of humanity that I wanted the girls to get. I think they have a wider point of view than the average person they meet and this they owe to the way they have traveled and which I owe also to the way I have traveled not only horizontally out into the many countries but vertically also, up and down the social ladder. It is a great education to like people and I was born liking [220] people. One of the best men I ever knew and regarded as a friend was the son of an emperor. The first and dearest friend I had thirty-five years ago when I came to the U.S. was a Negro woman and they stand with equal importance to me in my consciousness and I think of them with equal affection.

One thing I did find was that the girls were quite able to hold their own in any set or situation though they were only the product of the public schools of America. Given ability, a home where interesting things are valued and where human values are emphasized I know no better training-ground for the youth of the world than a public school education along the lines of the United States.

In the spring of 1931 we made our plans to accept Olga Fröbe's suggestion and go to her house on the Italian lakes for a few months. You can imagine the excitement of the planning, the buying of suitcases, the arranging of clothes and the speculations on the part of the girls about everything. They had never been anywhere in their lives outside of the United States, with the exception of my eldest girl, Dorothy, who had been in Hawaii. Alice Ortiz stepped in with her usual generosity and saw that we all had the right clothes, besides paying all travelling expenses.

We chose one of the smaller boats which went direct from New York to Antwerp, Belgium, and I will admit that I found life on board with three girls full of life and energy slightly exhausting. Keeping track of them was no joke. Rounding them up every evening at bedtime was also no joke. It is no fun for a girl when she is dancing most happily with some officer to see a parent standing on the sidelines and to know quite well it was bedtime. They were exceedingly good but exceedingly excited. They knew everyone on board, who they were, where they came from and what their names were, and they were most popular. [221]

Only a few years ago I came across a big bundle of material which when I unrolled it proved to be three fancy ball dresses I had made for the girls on board the boat. The idea was most unoriginal, for the dresses were the stars and stripes, dark blue skirts striped with white and white bodices trimmed with red five-pointed stars. I refused to put forty-eight stars on each bodice as it imposed too much sewing but the general effect was most patriotic and gay.

I shall never forget the day when we wound our way up the Scheldt river and docked at Antwerp. The girls, of course, had never seen a foreign city. Everything looked new and strange to them, from the fiacre in which we went to the hotel to the duvets on all beds. We went to the Hotel Des Flandes and had a good time the few days we were in Antwerp. The checked tablecloths in the Van Viordinaire, the foreign cooking and the cafe au lait, all were most exciting to them and full of memories to me.

A friend had crossed with us in order to be with us at Ascona but was leaving us after a few days in Antwerp as she wanted to go down the Rhine with her daughter. She had a very different conception as to how to enjoy a foreign land to that which Foster and I had. Down she would come in the morning with a daughter on one arm and a Baedeker on the other. "Alice," she would say to me, "what are you going to see this morning? There is a statue with three stars to it in the guide book, there are the Reubens to be seen in the cathedral and all kinds of other things. Which do you plan to do first?" To her great astonishment I would tell her that we were not going to do anything like that as we were not interested in statues of long dead military men or to visit every church that could be visited.

I told her that my main idea was that the girls should imbibe some of the atmosphere of the country they were in and see some of the people and watch how they live and what [222] they do at different hours of the day. So we were going to stroll about and sit in little cafes under the awnings and drink coffee and just sit and watch the people and listen and talk. So that is what we did whilst she went off in different directions. I never took the girls to see galleries to gaze at statues, talk about churches or do the everyday things which the average tourist does. We drifted about the streets. We looked into gardens. We would take a walk to the suburbs. At the end of a few days the girls had absorbed an enormous amount of knowledge of the town and its surroundings, its occupants and its history. We never bought souvenirs, but we took photographs, bought picture postcards and found out that foreign people were very like ourselves.

From Antwerp we went to Locarno, Switzerland, which was as far as we could go by train and there Olga met us and took us to her lovely villa where we stayed for a number of weeks. This train trip was a marvelous thing to the girls but an exhausting journey for me. We went on the "Blue train" through the Simplon and across the Cento valley.

It is quite hopeless to attempt to describe the beauty of the Italian lakes. To my mind Lake Maggiore on the shores of which Olga's villa is found, is one of the most beautiful and it is one of the largest in Italy. Part of the lake is in Swiss territory in the canton of Ticino but most of it is in Italy. The lake is so blue, the little villages are so picturesque, perched as they are on the sides of the hills reaching down into the water. I know nothing more beautiful to look at than the view from Ronco looking up and down the lake. It is useless for me to write about it for I have not got the words, but the beauty of it none of us will ever forget. Such are the things one pictures to oneself in moments of fatigue and disillusionment, and yet behind all this beauty were corruption and very ancient evil. [223]

The district had been at one time the center of the Black Mass in Central Europe and evidences of this could be found on the country roads. The little villages around had been largely deserted by their inhabitants owing to economic conditions and had been purchased by groups from Germany and France whose aims and ideas were anything but nice or clean. The few years preceding the war, particularly in Germany, were peculiarly nasty. All kinds of vices and evil were cultivated and a lot of those who practiced these undesirable modes of life hied themselves to the Italian lakes during the summer. Some day the place will be cleaned up and real spiritual work will go forward. One of the things we had to contend with was the spirit of evil which permeated the place and the peculiarly decadent and objectionable people who lived on the shore of the lake.

As soon as I found the kind of place it was, and that in spite of all its beauty there lurked much evil, I simply sat down and told the girls all about it. I was determined that they should not be so innocent that they would get into danger and I pointed out the types of people on the roads who were plainly the undesirable kind. I did not dress up the information in beautiful language. I told them baldly and straight just what it was all about, including its degeneracy and its homosexuality, so that they passed unscathed through a great deal which might have damaged them. You see, there were no secrets withheld, there were no peculiar sins and unholy performances that I had not told them had existed. I pointed out to them the type of people who indulged in these kinds of things and they were so blatantly obvious that the girls knew that it must be so. I have never believed in keeping young people free from the knowledge of that which is undesirable.

I have allowed them to read what they liked, provided that if it was a book that I felt was pure dirt I would tell [224] them about it and ask them why they wanted to read it. My experience was that if you were perfectly frank and yet perfectly willing to let them read even what you yourself felt was unwise, their natural cleanness and their natural fastidiousness were full protection. We never had any reading under the bedclothes, as far as I know, because they knew they could read what they liked, and that I would express myself freely. Anyway, the girls passed through three summers of Ascona and knew much that was going on and got no harm.

The first summer at Ascona we stopped with Olga in her own home but after that we occupied a small cottage overhanging the lake which she had built on her property. Close to our own home she had built a beautiful lecture hall where the meetings were held morning and afternoon. The grounds were lovely. The swimming and boating were ideal and the opportunity at first presented seemed to us Heaven sent, and to have in it the promise of wide future opportunities for expansion. The first year we were there the group was somewhat small but the last two years it steadily increased in size and I think it could be said that the work was a great success. People of all nationalities met there and we all lived together for weeks and got to know each other very well. National barriers seemed non-existent and we all spoke the same spiritual language.

It was there for the first time that we met Dr. Robert Assagioli, who had been our representative in Italy for several years, and our contact with him and the many years of work with him constitute one of the outstanding happy factors in our lives. He was at one time a leading brain specialist in Rome and when we first knew him was regarded as an outstanding European psychologist. He is a man of rare beauty of character. He could not come into a room without his essential spiritual qualities making his presence known. [225] Frank D. Vanderlip in his book "What Next in Europe" makes a striking comment about him. He calls him the modern St. Francis of Assisi and says that the morning he spent with Robert was a high-water mark of his European trip. Dr. Assagioli is a Jew. At the time we met him at Ascona and later visited him in Italy the Jews were well treated in that country. The approximately 30,000 Jews in Italy were valued as Italian citizens and were subjected to no restrictions or persecution.

The talks by Dr. Assagioli were outstanding features of the Ascona conferences. He would lecture in French, Italian and English and the spiritual power which poured through him was the means of stimulating many into renewed consecration in life. For the first two years he and I carried the bulk of the lecture work though there were other able and interesting speakers. The last year we were there the place was overrun by German professors and the whole tone and quality of the place altered. Some of them were most undesirable and the teaching given shifted from a relatively high spiritual plane to that of academic philosophy and a spurious esotericism. 1933 was the last year that we went there.

The second year that we went to Ascona was one of very real interest. Grand Duke Alexander joined us there and gave some very interesting talks and, more important still to me was the coming to Ascona of Violet Tweedale. It was a red-letter day for me when she arrived there and I can see her now coming down the hillside with her husband, and, immediately through the power of her spiritual personality, dominating the whole center. She was so beautiful, so gracious and so stately and her arrival marked the beginning of a very real friendship between her husband and herself and Foster and me. Later we stayed with them frequently in their beautiful home at Torquay, South Devon, [226] and when I got tired or worried I would go down to Violet and talk with her. She was a prolific writer. She wrote numerous popular novels and her books on psychism, based on her own experiences, are sound and intriguing and one of her last books, called The Cosmic Christ, has had a wide and most useful distribution. She was one of the few psychics in the world in whom it was possible absolutely to believe. She was highly intelligent; with a strong sense of humor and a well developed investigating spirit. She was a great student of the Tibetan's books and I kept her supplied with everything He wrote as soon as He wrote it. She was a friend of high and low and when she died not long ago there were hundreds besides myself and my husband who registered a sense of lasting loss. The brooch that she constantly wore was given to me by her husband and I wear it all the time and always think of her with the deepest love and affection.

Each year after our trip abroad we returned to the United States for some months, usually leaving the girls behind in England where we rented houses when needed and where one house, Ospringe Place in Kent, was very kindly put at our disposal for two years by a friend and school student.

During these years all the three girls married. As related, Dorothy married a Captain Morton, six months her senior and admirably suited to her. It is one of those really happy marriages that are satisfying to contemplate. I think that they are both fortunate. I know that Terence is for Dorothy one in a million, quiet, clever, kind and firm in the right places and Dorothy is witty, sparkling, quite a deep thinker and good psychologist, quick tempered, very artistic and devoted to her husband. Later, Ellison married a fellow-officer of Terence's, Arthur Leahy. Both Arthur and Terence are at the time of this writing Colonels on active [227] service abroad. One year, my second daughter, Mildred, came back with us to the States and there married Meredith Pugh which was a most unfortunate marriage, though the indications were that it should not have been an unhappy one. Circumstances arose which were so drastic that within four months Mildred was engaged, married and divorced and her little son was on the way. This same little son was more than adequate compensation for all she went through. There is no need for me to deal with the details of the story. On all counts Mildred handled a most difficult situation with poise and serenity and wisdom. When she returned to me in England I was amazed at her lack of rancor or spirit of revenge and retaliation but I was also amazed that anyone could look so desperately ill and still continue to live.

During these years in which my husband and I were five months over in Great Britain and Europe and seven months in the United States the school work was steadily growing. The work done in Ascona for three years had brought a number of people of different nationalities into the school and these along with others who had already joined the school through reading the books had produced a nucleus in many countries in Europe on which we could build the future work. The work in Spain under Francisco Brualla was going ahead exceedingly well and we already had several hundred Spanish students, most of them men. The work in Great Britain was also going ahead. Little groups of students scattered throughout the world were beginning to join the school together as a group.

One such group in India interested me very much. There was an organization in India called the Suddha Dharma Mandala. It had been founded by Sir Subra Maniyer. It was an occult order of apparently an advanced kind. I had come across one of the books they had put out and had [228] discovered several of the leaders of the Theosophical Society were working in the order, having outgrown the esoteric section in the T.S. I'm not a good hand at joining organizations but I wrote to the head of the order and asked permission to join but received no reply. The following year, as I had heard nothing, I wrote again and ordered some of their books, enclosing a check in payment. I received no reply and no books were sent me, though the check was cashed. After some months I sent a carbon copy of my previous letter to the head of the order but still received no reply. I gave up the attempt and decided that it was one of those peculiar, fake organizations which snare the gullible occidental.

Three years later I went down to Washington, D.C., to give a course of lectures in the New Willard Hotel. At the close of a lecture a man came up to me with a small suit case in his hand and said, "I have been ordered by the Suddha Dharma Mandala to give you these books." And there were all the books I had requested and my faith in the righteousness of the organization was restored. I heard no more for some time and then I got a letter from a member of the group saying that Sir Subra Maniyer was dead and that my book A Treatise on Cosmic Fire had been his constant companion and that on his death bed he had requested the seven senior members of his organization to join the Arcane School and put themselves under my instruction. This they did and for years this most interesting group of old Hindu students worked with us. All these men were old and have gradually died off until today there seem no more for me to be in touch with. They had a great reverence for H.P. Blavatsky and I found my contact with them most interesting.

Another link with H.P.B. came when a small group of Sinnett's people affiliated with the Arcane School, the first [229] of them being my friend Lena Rowan-Hamilton. They interjected into the school life some of the old tradition and a strong sense of relationship with the source in the 19th century of the Ageless Wisdom as its light streamed into the Occident.

One of the interesting developments in the school has been our steady stiffening of the requirements of membership. Increasingly we find ourselves rejecting students who are strictly on the emotional level and emphasizing the necessity for some mental focus and development, if the more advanced training of our senior degrees is to be given. As the years go by and the need of the world becomes more crucial the paralleling need of trained disciples also becomes increasingly apparent. The world has to be salvaged by those with both intelligence and love; aspiration and good intention are not enough.

During these years of travel we met many types of occultism in the different countries in Europe. Everywhere small groups could be contacted who were emphasizing some aspects of the Ageless Wisdom and some presentation of esoteric truth. The first indications of a rising spiritual tide could be seen everywhere, equally in Poland and Romania as in Great Britain and America. It was almost as if the door to a new spiritual life had been opened to humanity and that this evoked a corresponding uprising of the forces of evil which culminated in the World War; that this rising tide has been interrupted by the war I do not believe. I am confident that it will have led to an intensification of the spiritual urge and that those of us who are workers in the Masters' vineyard will have our hands full in future years in organizing, in encouraging and instructing those who are spiritually awake.

One of the reasons which has encouraged me to write this autobiography has been that I and the group associated [230] with us have been in the position to watch and recognize certain developments which under the guidance and influence of the Hierarchy have taken place on earth. Some of the work which is intended to inaugurate the new age and the future civilization, particularly from its spiritual angle, we ourselves have been used to initiate. Looking back over the years it is now very apparent to us what has been definitely accomplished by the Hierarchy through our instrumentality.

When I say this I am giving no indication of bragging or self satisfaction. We are only one of many groups through which the Masters of the Wisdom are working, and any group that forgets this is apt to become smug isolationist and, therefore, in imminent danger of collapse. We have been permitted to do certain things. Other disciples and groups have been responsible for initiating other projects under the guidance of their own Masters. All these projects if carried forward under Hierarchical inspiration and in a spirit of true humility and understanding are contributory to the factors in a great spiritual enterprise which the Hierarchy started in 1925. It is with one of these dramatic expressions of Hierarchical purpose that I want to deal at this time.

In 1932 when we were at Ascona I received a communication from the Tibetan which was published in the fall in a pamphlet entitled, The New Group of World Servers. This was epoch making in its significance though only a few people as yet realize its true meaning.

The position taken by the spiritual Hierarchy on our planet was that a group was in process of formation that had in it the nucleus of the coming world civilization and was characterized by the qualities that would distinguish that civilization during the next 2500 years. These qualities are primarily a spirit of inclusiveness, a potent desire selflessly to serve one's fellowmen plus a definite sense of [231] spiritual guidance, emanating from the inner side of life. This new group of world servers includes two definite divisions. The first part of the group has a close relationship to the spiritual Hierarchy. It is composed of aspirants working towards discipleship under the guidance of certain of the Masters' disciples who, in their turn, are directed and guided by a few world disciples whose work is on such a large scale that it is definitely international in scope. This group acts as a definite intermediary between the spiritual Hierarchy of our planet and the mass of humanity. Through them the Masters of the Wisdom, under the direction of the Christ, are working out gigantic plans of world salvage.

This attempt to lead humanity onward along new and more definite lines and on a much larger scale than heretofore is made possible by the coming in of the Aquarian age. This Aquarian age is both astronomical and astrological in import.

There is a very strong prejudice in the world today against astrology and this is understandable and also constitutes a definite safeguard for the gullible and the stupid. Predictional astrology is, to my personal point of view, both a menace and a handicap. If a person is highly developed they will begin to rule their stars. They will do the unpredictable and their horoscopes will prove inaccurate and have no meaning at all. If a person is undeveloped then the probability is that their stars completely condition them and their horoscopes will therefore be entirely accurate from the predictional angle. When this is so and the person accepts the dictum of their horoscope their free will is completely stultified, they work entirely within the limits of their horoscope and the result of this is that they fail to make any personal effort to free themselves from the possible determining factors.

I often smile to myself when people boast and say [232] that their horoscope is entirely accurate and that everything happened to them as their horoscope indicated. What they are really saying amounts to - I am an entirely mediocre person; I have no free will of my own; I am entirely conditioned by my stars and, therefore, have not the faintest intention of making any progress in this life at all. This type of horoscope is one that the best of astrologers avoid. The finest men in this field are primarily concerned with character delineation which is most helpful and with the effort to discover in what manner the horoscope of the soul can be cast so that the life purpose of the incarnating individual can be ascertained, and therefore a clear distinction can be made between the tendencies of the personality established through many incarnations and the emerging purpose and will of the soul.

When, however, one comes to a consideration of the astrological implications to astronomical happenings the story is very different. People hear the statement made that we are now transiting into the sign Aquarius which means that from the angle of the zodiac, which is the imaginary path of the sun in the heavens, the sun appears to be going through the constellation Aquarius. This is an astronomical fact at this time and has nothing to do with astrology. The influence, however, of the sign through which the sun may be passing at any particular world period is irrefutable and I can prove it to you here and now.

Prior to the Jewish dispensation when Moses was leading the children of Israel out of Egypt the sun was in the sign Taurus. It was passing through the sign of the Bull. We then had the appearance on earth of the Mithraic mysteries which centered around the sacrifice of the sacred bull. The sin of the children of Israel in the wilderness which so aroused the anger of Moses when he descended from the mount of the Lord and found them falling down before [233] the golden calf was that they had reverted to a past and obsolete religion which they should have left behind. The Jewish dispensation itself was governed by the sign of Aries, the Ram, through which the sun was passing for the next 2000 years. Then we have the appearance of the scapegoat in Jewish history. We have the Bible story of the ram caught in the thicket and all this was due to the influence of the passing of the sun through the sign of the bull and the sign of the ram.

Something apart from the findings of academic astrology, which even at present could only touch a very few people, produced these natural reactions. Some influence, emanating from the sign of the bull and the sign of the ram produced the symbology which conditioned the religious life of the people of that era. This becomes still more apparent when the sun transitted into the next constellation, the sign of Pisces the Fishes. Then we had the appearance of Christ and the fish symbology which ran so characteristically through the entire Gospel story. His disciples were largely fishermen. He performed the miracles with fishes and sent His apostles out after His death under the leadership of St. Peter with the injunction to be fishers of men. It is for this reason that the mitre which the Pope wears is the mouth of the fish.

Now, according to astronomy we are transiting into the sign of Aquarius, the sign of the water-carrier, the sign of universality, for water is a universal symbol. Prior to His death Christ sent His disciples out to find the water-carrier who led them to an upper room where the communion service was instituted. All this was indicative of the recognition by the Christ of the coming new era which would succeed His dispensation and into which we are at this time entering. Leonardo da Vinci's great picture of the communion in the upper room is the great symbol of the [234] Aquarian age, for we shall sit down together under the loving direction of Christ when brotherhood will be established and men will be banded together in the bonds of divine relationship. The old barriers between man and man and nation and nation will, during the next 2000 years slowly disappear.

It was to inaugurate and institute this work that the Hierarchy announced the emergence on earth of the New Group of World Servers, led and guided by disciples and spiritual aspirants who know no sense of separateness, who see all men alike, irrespective of color or creed, and who are pledged to work without cessation for the promotion of international understanding, economic sharing and religious unity.

The second part of the group in the organization of the New Group of World Servers is composed of the men and women of goodwill. These are not strictly speaking spiritual aspirants. They are not particularly interested in the Plan and have little or no knowledge of the planetary Hierarchy. They do, however, want to see right relations established among men. They want to see justice and kindness prevail on earth. Under the direction of the world disciples and their helpers these people can be trained in practical and effective ways of expressing goodwill. In this way they can do basic and foundational work in preparing the world for a fuller expression of the spiritual purpose. They can familiarize mankind with the need for right human relations expressed in every community, in every nation and, eventually, on an international scale.

For this the disruption of the present world war has effectively cleared the stage. The evils of wrong human relations, the wickedness of aggression and racial discrimination are made so apparent that only the stupid and unintelligent can fail to see the necessity for active goodwill. [235] So many people of good intentions theoretically accept the fact that God is love and blissfully hope that He will make that love apparent in humanity.

Thus the New Group of World Servers was launched into the consciousness of modern humanity. The pamphlet outlining this ideal received the widest distribution and it was followed by other pamphlets on the same subject written by the Tibetan and enlarging upon the basic theme of spiritual purpose and goodwill. The Tibetan in these pamphlets outlined a definite procedure for us to follow. He advocated the building up of mailing lists of the men and women of goodwill in the various countries in the world. He suggested our organizing what He called Units of Service in as many countries in the world as possible. He outlined for us the nature of the teaching which they should receive and these suggestions and injunctions we immediately proceeded to carry out.

From 1933 until 1939 we occupied ourselves with the spreading of the doctrine of goodwill, with the organizing of Units of Service in nineteen different countries and in finding those men and women who responded to the vision of the Tibetan and were willing to do what they could to promote right human relations and spread the idea of goodwill amongst men.

Foster and I have always been dissatisfied with the emphasis laid upon peace. For years the peace groups in the world have been occupied in spreading the idea of peace, piling up mailing-lists of people who endorsed the idea of peace - and who doesn't - and in spreading everywhere the demand that peace become a compulsory thing. We have felt very strongly that this was putting the cart before the horse.

In the days of violent peace propaganda between World War I and World War II the idea of peace made great [236] strides. Millions of names appeared on lists demanding peace. The Axis nations welcomed the idea of peace propaganda for it represented a soporific condition in which no steps would be taken to arm the nations against possible aggressors. The fact that war is largely incidental to rotten economic conditions led to little real activity to put these conditions right. People continued to starve; many continued to be underpaid in all parts of the world; child labor was not wiped out in any country though great strides were made in the endeavor so to do; the over-population of the world steadily increased the difficulties. All conditions that might incite to war were present everywhere even while the cry was going up "let there be peace on earth."

When the angels sang at Bethlehem they said, "Glory to God in the highest" - the final consummation and goal. Then "Peace on earth" - where humanity as a whole is concerned and, as the first and absolutely necessary step, "Goodwill towards men." Goodwill has to come first if there is ever to come peace and this has been forgotten. People have attempted to initiate a period of peace before there has been any demonstration of goodwill. There can be no peace until goodwill is a conditioning factor in all human relations.

Another revolutionary thing that the Tibetan did was when He dictated the contents of A Treatise on Cosmic Fire. In this book He gave what H.P.B. prophesied He would give, the psychological key to cosmic creation. H.P.B. stated that in the 20th century a disciple would come who would give information concerning the three fires with which The Secret Doctrine deals: electric fire, solar fire and fire by friction. This prophecy was fulfiled when A Treatise on Cosmic Fire was given out to the public. This book concerns the fire of pure spirit or life; the fire of the mind that vitalizes every atom of the solar system [237] and creates the medium through which the Sons of God develop. It also concerns the fire of matter producing that attraction and repulsion which is the basic law of evolution, and holding forms together so as to provide vehicles for the evolving life and later, when they have served their purpose, repulsing those forms so that the evolving lives can move on their way to higher evolution. The true significance of this book will only be appreciated towards the close of this century. It is of a profundity and a depth of technical knowledge which lies beyond the understanding of the ordinary reader. It is also a bridging book because it takes certain basic, oriental ideas and phrases and introduces them to the occidental student, whilst at the same time it makes practical the sometimes vague, metaphysical concepts of the East.

A third unique thing which the Tibetan has accomplished, and this within the last few months, has been to present the platform and certain indications as to rituals upon which the new world religion can be founded.

The need has long been apparent for some point of contact between the exoteric religions of the West and the esoteric faiths of the East. On the levels of the esoteric or spiritual approach to divinity there has always been uniformity between the East and the West. The techniques followed by the mystical seeker after God in the Occident are identical with those followed by the seeker in the Orient. At a certain point on the path of return to God all ways meet and then the procedure is uniform for all subsequent stages of approach. The steps in meditation are identical. This will be apparent to anyone who studies the works of Meister Eckhart and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. All of the great expansions of consciousness as outlined in the Hindu philosophy and the expression of these five great expansions as portrayed in the five great crises in the life [238] of the Christ, related in the New Testament, are also the same. When man begins consciously to seek out God and consciously to take himself in hand for discipline and endurance, he finds himself at one with seekers in the East and in the West and with those who lived before Christ ever came and with those who are seeking today.

It was in an effort to make the relation between the East and the West clear that I wrote the book, The Light of the Soul. It is a commentary upon the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, who lived and taught probably 9000 years before Christ. The Tibetan gave me the paraphrase of the ancient Sanskrit phrases because I know no Sanskrit but I, myself, wrote the commentary, as I was anxious to present an interpretation of the Sutras which would be more adapted to the Western type of mind and consciousness than the usual oriental presentation. I also wrote From Bethlehem to Calvary in order to trace the significance of the five major episodes in the life of the Christ - the birth, baptism, transfiguration, crucifixion and resurrection - and their relationship to the five initiations as outlined for the Eastern disciple. Both these books have a definite bearing upon the new world religion.

The time must come when the work of the great Master in the East, the Buddha, Who came to earth and achieved illumination and became the guide and teacher of millions of orientals, and the work of the Christ, Who came as the teacher and savior recognized first by the occident, must achieve fusion. There is no divergence or conflict in Their teaching. There is no competition between Them. They stand forth as the two greatest world teachers and saviors. One has guided the Orient and the other has guided the Occident nearer to God.

It is this theme that the Tibetan elaborates in His pamphlet, The New World Religion. He indicates that the [239] work of the Buddha prepared people for the Path of Discipleship, whilst the work of the Christ prepared people for Initiation. He indicated a ritual in this pamphlet in which the great day of the Buddha, the Wesak Festival (the Vaisakha Festival at the May full moon), and Easter Sunday, fixed by the April full moon, stood for the illuminated Buddha and the risen Christ, whilst the full moon of June was the Festival of Humanity making its major annual approach to God under the guidance of Christ. The other full moons in each month constitute lesser festivals in which certain spiritual qualities necessary for the expression of discipleship and initiation are considered and emphasized.

One other revolutionary activity brought to the attention of humanity by the Tibetan indicates the first steps that are being taken by the Hierarchy to approach closer to humanity, to restore the ancient Mysteries, and to externalize and make possible the manifestation upon the physical plane of the Masters and Their groups of disciples gathered together in what are technically called Ashrams.

Implicit in this effort, therefore, lies the significance of the second advent of the Christ. He will come bringing His disciples with Him. The Masters will again some day be present upon earth as They were millions of years ago during the infancy of mankind. Then They left us for a while and disappeared behind the veil which separates the seen from the unseen. This they did in order to give man time to develop free will, to become an adult using his mind, making his own decisions, orienting himself finally towards the kingdom of God and consciously endeavoring to tread the path of return. This has taken place on such a large scale that it now appears possible that within the coming century the Masters may emerge from Their silence and again be known among men. To this end the Tibetan has [240] been working and many of us have been collaborating with Him.

He also instituted the new rules for disciples which permit a much greater freedom to the individual disciple than do the rules so well known in the past. No obedience is today exacted. The disciple is regarded as an intelligent agent and is left free to fulfil the requirements as he sees best. No secrecy is enjoined because no disciple is admitted into an Ashram or into a place of initiation as long as there is the slightest danger that he will speak. Disciples are now being trained telepathically and the actual physical presence of a Master is no longer necessary. The old personal development is no longer emphasized. The need of humanity is presented as the major incentive for spiritual development. Disciples are being taught today to work together in groups with the possibility of group initiations held before them, an entirely new idea and vision. The physical disciplines are no longer obligatory. The modern disciple, intelligent, loving and serving, is regarded as not requiring them. He should have outgrown his physical appetites and be free now to serve. Much of this teaching is given in a book just published, Discipleship in the New Age, which contains instructions that the Tibetan gave to a group of His disciples in the world, some of whom were known to me and some of whom were not. This is the first time in the history of the Hierarchy, as far as we know, that the detailed instructions given by a Master to His group of disciples have ever been published and so put into the hands of the general public.

In the above paragraphs I have attempted very briefly to describe some of the activities which the Tibetan initiated in an effort along with other members of the Hierarchy to strike the keynote of the new age, and it is upon these [241] things in the senior degrees of the Arcane School that we seek to lay the emphasis.

Some of the students have been with us twenty years or more. They have faithfully done their work and are definitely getting results. Later we hope to develop certain groups that will use some of the techniques with which the Tibetan has dealt in what will probably be His outstanding work, A Treatise on the Seven Rays. There He elaborates a new school of healing. He gives the technique for building the path of Light between soul and spirit, just as man has created a path between himself and the soul. He emphasizes, also, the new esoteric astrology which deals with the purpose of the soul and the way which the disciple must tread. He also gives the fourteen rules which Initiates have to follow, and this treatise in five volumes is, therefore, a complete compendium of the spiritual life and presents those new formulations of ancient truths which during the Aquarian age will guide humanity.

Towards 1934 we began to visit other parts of Europe. During the next five years we went at different times to Holland, to Belgium, to France and to Italy, and usually when in Europe we went to Geneva or Lausanne or Zurich and stayed there for a little while. People from different parts of Europe would meet us there. It was very revealing to us after so many years work to find ourselves facing an audience in Rotterdam, or Milan, in Geneva or Antwerp and find exactly the same quality in the people as in Great Britain and the United States. The same things could be said to them; the same vision of brotherhood and of discipleship. Their reactions were the same. They understood and longed for the same liberation and the same spiritual experiences.

I got quite adept at speaking through an interpreter. When lecturing in Italy Dr. Assagioli would act as my [242] interpreter and when in Holland the head of our work there, Gerhard Jansen (usually called Gerry by those of us who love him) translated for me. I watched him sometimes in a cosmopolitan crowd and heard him switch with equal facility to half a dozen different languages. Prior to the war he did a fine piece of work in Holland. Practically all his school papers were translated into Dutch and he himself handled a large and earnest body of students. The work in Holland and the work in Spain were two very bright spots and different as these countries were in temperament there was no difference in their earnestness.

At this point the manuscript ends. [245]