I remember, years ago, in the course of a deeply interesting conversation with Phillipps Brooks, the late Bishop of Massachusetts, that I asked him what he thought about modern theosophy, which was just then becoming a _culte_ in his native town of Boston. There was a great deal of talk at the time about the new philosophy and the wonderful phenomena said to accompany its propaganda. Sir Edwin Arnold had written his "Light of Asia," and Oliver Wendell Holmes had welcomed it with wondering awe, as something approaching a new revelation. And smaller people were talking about the historical Blavatsky tea-cups, and hidden heirlooms found in Indian gardens, and some of us were wondering how soon we should learn to fly, and what would come next.
The bishop's answer to my question was so genial, so characteristic, and showed such divine common-sense!
"It is not a question of _flying_," he said. "I should like to fly as much as anybody; and a queer sort of bird I should appear!" (He was well over six feet, and broad in proportion.)
"If you suddenly found you could fly," he continued, "it would be _absorbing_ on Monday morning, _intensely interesting_ on Tuesday, _interesting_ on Wednesday, and _quite pleasant_ on Thursday, but by the end of the week it would be getting normal, and you would want to discover some other new power. No, believe me, the real question is not _flying_, but WHERE you would fly, and WHAT YOU WOULD DO WHEN YOU GOT THERE."
This sums up the case in a nut shell, and seems to me only another way of saying: "Don't forget the spiritual significance beneath the scientific symbol."
And I would add: "Let us all join hands in the interesting and absorbing work of trying to make our symbols as scientific as we can, by finding out the laws which govern them, as well as all other things, in this universe of Love and Law. Probably we are here to learn, above all things else, that Love and Law are ONE."
Many people have had far more remarkable experiences than mine. For various good reasons I have carefully abstained from any attempt to cultivate, or in any way increase, the sensitiveness which is natural to me.
I can only assure my readers that my record has been absolutely accurate. In many cases it would have been very easy to write up the stories into some far more dramatic form; but by doing so the whole aim and object of my book would have been destroyed.