THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 11808, 10 August 1900, Page 2

THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY.

In the rooms of the Theosophical Society- on Wednesday evening Mr A. W. Maurais addressed a public meeting on "The Armour1 of Righteousness." The lecture commenced -with a definition of " righteousness," which was construed as meaning everything which made for evolution. Men were on this planet for the purpose of passing through certain evolutionary phases—physical, mental, and moral—by the ordination of the Logos; consequently, all that assisted man to climb upwards was accounted righteousness, while that which retarded his ascent was unrighteousness, or sin. ,Nor, -asserted the speaker, were t.he same experiences necessary at all stages of growth. Thus, in his savage and semi-savage state the forceful impacts of pain and riotous pleasure, the gratification of lust and cruelty, the development of intense selfishness, were, with their counterpoise of physical suffering and mental unhappiness, necessary to the making of a man. By these things his intellectual development was stimulated; and, finally, as he was reborn again arid again, .the memory of past pain acted asa deterrent. For, said the speaker, the memory of the real man —the eternal, reincarnating in^dividual —acted in the lower, personal man, as character, and conscience was but the earthly man's dim remembrance of past experiences which his spiritual ego recollected with absolute accuracy. Eventually the time arrived when, having learned the law by long and painful combat with it, a man definitely took his own evolution in hand, and prepared to ascend the higher rungs of the ladder of evolution, and at this point he called to his aid the armour of righteousness. The lecturer went on to describe the bodies which, it was alleged, all men possessed for use on various subtle planes of natnre—as the physical body: was used Jon this plane,—and of these the mental body, vibrating in a correct way, became the armour of righteousness. Every thought, set this body vibrating, and it had the property of absorbing vibrations,of a similar kind to its own—thus, a thoiight of hate would, within a brief perjod, impinge upon all the mental bodies on the planet as the vibrations rayed outwards, and those attuned to hate absorbed that thought and vibrated more intensely in answer. " 'So with loving thoughts, and love—not passionate, earthly love, but the intense, rhythmic, unselfish love that " sought not its own"—was the true armour of righteousness. He who so thought, unruffled, unwounded by the- shafts of malice, which rebounded from that perfect armour to the minds that originated them, as the boomerang came back to the savage hand —he. so thinking, was a potent influence .making for righteousness, and was assisting in the evolutionary work of the Logos. Mr G. Richardson presided, and several questions were asked by the audience at the close of the address. " V".