Invisible Helpers

They find that the glory, beauty, and poetry are present in fuller measure than they had ever hoped before. These are no longer mere pleasant dreams from which the cold light of common sense might at any time rudely awaken them, but truths of nature that will bear investigation—truths that become only brighter, fuller, and more perfect as they are more accurately understood.

A marked instance of this beneficial action of Theosophy is the way in which the invisible world—which, before the great wave of materialism engulfed us, used to be regarded as the source of all living help—has been restored to modern life. All the charming folk-lore of the elf, the brownie, and the gnome, of the spirits of air and water, of the forest, the mountain, and the mine, is shown by it to be no mere meaningless superstition, but to have a basis of actual and scientific fact behind it. Its answer to the great fundamental question, “If a man die, shall he live again?” is equally definite and scientific, and its teaching on the nature and conditions of life after death throws a flood of light upon much that, for the Western world at least, was previously wrapped in impenetrable darkness.

It cannot be too often repeated that in this teaching as to the immortality of the soul and the life after death, Theosophy stands in a position totally different from that of ordinary religion.