Esoteric Buddhism

in the East as in the West, a series of leading
ideas, relating to the actual verities of Nature,
and the real facts of Man’s progress through
evolution, which have been communicated to the
writer in their present shape by Eastern phi-
losophers, and thus fall most readily into an
Oriental mould. But the value of these teach-
ings will perhaps be most fully realized when
we clearly perceive that they are scientific in
their character, rather than polemical. Spirit-
ual truths, if they are truths, may evidently be
dealt with in a no less scientific spirit than
chemical reactions. And no religious feeling,
of whatever color it may be, need be disturbed
by the importation into the general stock of
knowledge of new discoveries about the consti-
tution and nature of Man on the plane of his
higher activities. True religion will eventually
find a way to assimilate such fresh knowledge
in the same way that it finally acquiesces in a
gradual enlargement of knowledge on the phys-
ical plane. This, in the first instance, may
sometimes disconcert notions associated with
religious belief,—as geological science at first
embarrassed biblical chronology. But in time
men came to see that the essence of the biblical
statement does not reside in the literal sense of
cosmological passages, and religious conceptions
grew all the purer for the relief thus afforded.