yourself and the world know to be wrong and matters of weakness. Imbibe this idea, and though you fall far below the perfect point, yet you have endeavored to live in accordance with your highest ideal and will escape the condemnation of an enlightened reason.

Another source of great trouble with the followers of the esoteric principles is anxiety. In this direction we should exercise constant watchfulness.

One of our most important fundamental principles is herein embodied, namely to preserve a steady, unwavering calmness and serenity in all the trials and vicissitudes of our daily lives. Therefore let us remember and practice the jewel-ideal of consistency. Let us make the examples of our daily experiences completely unassailable to those who are watching us so closely. In the stillness and sweetness of perfectly balanced characters we can hold up to the world a few men and women, whom people at last will recognize, venerate and love.

Whatever the trial, whatever the cross; though calumny comes and injustice, falsehood and error be heaped upon us, yet pass these all unheeded, remembering that they are sentiments of ignorance, - unreliable and fleeting. Remember that we are working for an eternal object and if obstacles arise before us, they must quickly go down if we strive to look in faith over and beyond them.

Through perfect trust, and adherence to our principles of patience and stillness, will all come right and at the last, adversity will turn to prosperity, the darkness to Eternal Light.

We realize fully that our basic principles are right. We as fully realize that a nobler work has never been sought by man than this which now is fully inaugurated. So, thoroughly believing and comprehending the immensity of the design before us, let us add weight and character to it by being true. Let us, as mercilessly as nature in a similiar case would do, root out from our lives every useless inconsistent act or habit that can possibly be turned against the esoteric idea of spiritual development.

If we have yet appetites and sensual enjoyments which have clung to us thus far, let us now cut them off and cast them from us once and forever. How can we retain such when we are exhorting others to be free? Our words, our exhortations, our prayers are totally without effect just so long as we show by our daily lives that what we preach we do not practise. While we give utterance to the grand, inspiring esoteric truths and by our lives give those truths the direct lie, we are sinking ourselves lower than the most miserable of those whom we seek to uplift. We are descending by regular, systematic degrees into a pit at the bottom of which is destruction inevitable. Then we can look nowhere in God's universe for extrication from our deplorable situation, for we were fully conversant with our shortcomings and we knew, fully and completely, that we were posing before our fellow man as examples of goodness, while within our true consciousness we were branded hypocrites.

Ah, it is so easy to give utterance to fine, noble sentiment in words, and so very, very hard to conform to the letter of the law which those words imply. It is so easy to tell others what to do, but so very difficult to keep ourselves in harmony with these beautiful theories and doctrines. And why does this difficulty, this inconsistency perpetually confront us? Are not even the first principles embodied within the word "Esoteric" understood by us? Surely we cannot offer such a flimsy excuse. If we are

false to the solemn covenant which has been made with God by each and every one of us, then the curse be justly upon us, and our previous work and effort be as if they never had been, for there can be no merit in what we strive through hypocrisy or deceit to accomplish, for in the end all our deeds are brought under the glare of the strong, unflinching light of Truth. The writer sincerely believes that a sin or an omission of duty, which is the most hopeless of all sinfulness, is great, just in proportion as we are alive to the discrimination of good and evil.

A person thoroughly conversant with all shades of vice, worldliness and deceit in general, who, knowing all this, yet allows himself to participate in them is the most degraded of all sinners and will find no hope in the judg ment which ultimately his outraged better self will render.

Can we therefore be too thoroughly alert? Can we afford to lose sight of the fact that upon each and all depends the success or failure of these grand ideas?

There is no middle course for us now. We know what we are attempting to accomplish. Our whole being is fully alive to the necessity for faithfulness. No man's word should now serve as a basis upon which to rest. We know of ourselves that the road laid out is the course for all mankind to safely follow, if spiritual growth is desired..

And now let us press forward. The goal is already in sight, though obscured by fogs and clouds of adverse thought, ignorance and careless

ness.

Faithfulness, conformity to principle; crucifixion of every low, animal appetite; continual desire for light and guidance from our own source of strength within as well as from the Universal Power without, will bridge all difficulties and place our Divine principles before the sinking world with such weight and persistency that none can resist endorsing and finally being saved thereby.

Talk consistency, think consistency, retire with it uppermost in your de sires and awaken with its reverberations echoing through the temple of your soul. Fill to overflowing your whole life with this Divine Light, then will peace and perfect harmony descend upon you all.

C. H. MACKAY.

A SOUL CRY.

SPIRIT within, respond to my

Impassioned call, my feeble sigh

For truth unknown, my plaintive cry

For life and liberty!

Help me to conquer and to dare

Each sense to crush, healed wounds to tear

Again in twain! And this my prayer,

Oh, make me ONE with Thee!

I. A. P.

THE SCIENCE OF UNDERSTANDING.

BY WILLIAM COX.

Fourteenth Paper.

The Muses- The Daughters of Memory.

THE NAME OF A THING IS NO PART OF THE THING ITSELF. Regulated and controlled by the processes of growth, the chit, sprout, stem, branch, leaf, bud, blossom, and fruit, are successively evolved from a primal germ. So from the primal germ mind are evolved the ten principles, namely, Power, Knowledge, Experience, Reason, Strength, Motion, Zeal, Virtue, Justice, and Mercy; which are the buds and blossoms of the mental tree that culminate into the intellectual fruiting of Understanding. The senses, touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing are the roots, and through them are supplied the fertilizing material and nourishing properties, which support and enrich the tree desiring its growth. Coequal with the growth of these principles, and co-related to them, is the product of Memory, Thought, Counsel, and "Another," which depends also upon the action and integrity of the senses; indeed without these there could be no Thought, Counsel, Memory, and "Another." Memory is the mother of all sensations, whether pleasurable or painful. The offsprings of Memory are negative in character and are therefore properly called daughters: they are sisters of joy, and their missions are those of pleasure, inspiration, instruction, gladness, and excitement. They perform their work properly and well when there is great and vigorous action of the mind; when the mind is sluggish and inactive the memory is dull, or fails to respond altogether, and becomes unequal to the task of reflecting upon the mind's mirror the pictures sketched by the pencils of the senses; a perfect well rounded and evenly balanced memory results from the action of all senses.

Memory is the mental record of events.

Thought is the function of mental offsprings in communion.

"Another" is the nursing mother. The co-causes in nature, producing growth to vegetal and animal life, is what the senses are to the mind, and the mind fructifiers, personified, are the female parent intellectual, from whose womb come the influences operating in developing the principles which govern and direct matter. The seed of Law, the universal governor developed in the matrix of memory, brings forth offsprings negative in character; these daughters of memory are the Muses (amuses), uine in number, as follows: Clio, or history; Melpomene, or tragedy; Thalia, or comedy; Terpsichore, or song and dance; Euterpe, or music of the wind; Erato, or music of the the strings: Calliope, or poetry; Urania, or astronomy; and Polyhymnia, or eloquence. These are the sisters, that dance about the palace of Understanding; they occasionally flit in and out of the doors, but they never sit on the throne of Understanding.

Fascinating and beautiful though these sisters be, they are out of the memory by the senses, and not out of the soul; they are sensual, not spiritual daughters, they are children of genius, and genius is born in and out of the memory; being of sensual and sensuous origin, all the sensual and sensuous are attracted to and by them; Terpsichore, Euterpe, and Erato, especially, are found in the company of the sensual. Dancing and music are not unacquainted with crime; vice, indeed, is fostered by them.

The passions, and not the soul, respond to the rhythmic tapping of the feet of Terpsichore; thoughts spiritual and divine come to strengthen and bless the devout one in the quiet closet of secret prayer, and not in some hall of gilded splendor, where dancers, giddy, whirl to the measured swell of voluptuous music.

One of the most valued, because one of the most helpful, of the nine sisters, is Clio, or history. Clio partaking more of sight and hearing, is less sensual than any one of the sisters, excepting Urania; Clio instructs, history teaches; it is fractional knowledge; the significance of Clio is the consecutive clinging together of events. When, through the media of the senses, the memory acquires and records what happened, the mind developed or evolved from this process is historical, and Clio, an art sister, and one of the natural daughters of memory, is born. Moved by the spell of Clio's enchantment, people are taught by the records of Herodotus and Tacitus, delighted with the word-pictures of Gibbon and Macaulay, and thrilled by the blazing panorama of Carlysle's French revolution; these names are for time incribed upon the scroll of Clio. Melpomene, sombre, sad, of ghastly face, can "start and tremble at the wagging of a straw," wraps her inky cloak of tragedy about the forms of the passionate Siddons, Kean, Macready and Booth. Thalia, with comic grin and laughter musical, sits in the midst of pleasure's guests and with her flashes of merriment sets the table in a roar, and joy hilarious holds carnival at the beckoning smile of Thalia. Out of the rosy mists of remembrance come the forms of Garrick, Burton, and a host of jolly leering company, who lived to gladden oft saddened hearts with a little of this music of laughter. Terpsichore, with grace and lithesome form, is of all the sisters the most fascinating to the sensual; she is like that voluptuous Venus who, while tapping with her fingers upon the tambourine, danced her way into the assembled guests upon high Olympus, entrancing and exciting the most staid and decorous among them. The queens in Terpsichore's realm, who have "tripped the light fantastic" into the senses of men, almost to the ruin of their souls, Taglioni, and Fanny Elsler, have a record; minds influenced by Wisdom, and strong in the possession of Understanding, are never enslaved by the blandishments of Terpsichore. The gay and thoughtless, the giddy and foolish, the children of Ignorance, Folly, and Depravity, everywhere, are found in the tinselled halls of Terpsichore, chasing with rapid feet upon the smooth and slippery floor, the mocking flying phantoms of pleasure.

Euterpe interprets the language of the wind, from the thundering basso of the tempest's breath, as it howls through the cannons of the Sierras, to the light Soprano of the Zephyr, as it croons a lullaby at evening time, among the whispering grasses. Euterpe sings among the trees; the listener hears her song on the summit of the Himalaya, in the dense forests over the tops of the Andes, the sear and yellow, the evergreen Flora, and again in Sierra Nevada; and so Euterpe wraps her song of the wind about the whirling world. The organ, sublime and inspiring, is her instrument, and Allspeech sits at the keys; trumpet and oboe, flute and clarionet, and the ram's horns whose blasts overthrew the temple, are Euterpe's own. Erato, light of touch, sweeps her harp-strings, and saddened hearts grow glad again; in many an olden castle in Erin's Isle harper-minstrels gathered, filling the dim aisles with streams of tender melody to "the Harp, that once in Tara's hall." David sang, and moved the multitude to

tears, as he swept the strings of Erato's instrument; and when sorrow came to the children of Israel they hung their harps on the willow, and by the waters of Babylon sat down and wept. Calliope. Sweet voiced poetry, whether it sleeps in the heart of a flower, or glows in the tint of a sunset, or mutely pleads in snowy grace of sculptured marble, or speaks in rhythmic measures through metered lines, is personified by Calliope; and Shakespeare and Moliere, Phidias and Powers, are her disciples. Calliope walks upon the sea-shore, and gathers pearls and shells, she loiters among the ferns and mosses of green valleys, and plucks the blossoms from every garden with which to decorate herself; the Calliopean mind, figuratively speaking, is a mind of shells, and ferns, and flowers, and not a mind reflective; and is not always guided into the haven of happiness by the hand of Reason. Urania, of all the sisters is the noblest, and best of the natural daughters of Memory: Urania, or Astronomy, is the opposite of Calliope, for she rejects that which is fanciful, and accepts only the exact and mathematical; she is oftener found in the company of Understanding than any other of the Muses. The Uranian mind is exemplified in Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo, Herschel, Newton, and, in a large degree, by Napoleon it seeks after the unknown, to make it known, it evolves practical knowledge from the seemingly abstract, it deals with things that are, and is strong in deducing, arranging, and applying; though all the people should deny, it still smiles, for it knows, that the stars shine for a purpose. Polyhymnia is the most accomplished, and the one seldom seen, of the daughters; interpreted, it is " many hymns," or eloquence. The voice of eloquence is tuned to many keys, and it sings its songs from the gutter to God. The power and possibilities of genius are best shown by eloquence; people listen and are more moved by it than aught else in the range of art; great eloquence is possible only when the memory is unusually active; and it is as full of delights and suprises as the imagination is full of fancies; it is of all charms the chiefest charm, whose hidden power holds in captive bonds congregated mind delighted. These are the muses, daughters of Memory, beautiful and lovely, with delicate feet, who dance around, keeping safe, the flowery altar, within the spacious and divine temple of the mighty son of Time. The beauty, grace, and glow of life depend upon those sisters, but mental health, vigor, integrity, and spirit-pureness, are sustained by Understanding.

THE intention of the mystic ceremonies is to conjoin us with the world and the gods. Sallust. TEMPERANCE, is, as I conceive, a sort of order and control of certain pleasures and desires; this is implied in the saying of a man being his own master.

Plato. In opposing sorrow, friendly help is difficult (to find), in seeking religious truth there must be rare enlightenment; let us then be knit together thus as friends, and then at last there will be rest from sorrow. Buddha.

It is an historical fact, that the priesthood always wishes to keep religious ideas stationary, and that every religious reform began with individuals or with the civil power. This will be the case as long as religious governors do not keep pace in knowledge and moral improvements with the community at large.

Spurzheim.