The ever-mounting tide of life which softened and quickened the still stone into the plant, which from the plant slowly worked out the animal, whose ceaseless pulsing through the ages wove at last the mind of man, now in its divine work begins to awaken in mankind a higher consciousness. Beyond man it cannot go; it can only fashion a diviner and diviner man. Men are arising of greater soul than once, compassionate instead of self-seeking.
Especially in these later days is the spirit of self-seeking beginning to find of a higher ideal, taking the positive form of prompting to other than selfish its evil reign troubled. Men are beginning to feel the presence within themselves thoughts and acts, to self-sacrifice, in the interests of a wider and wider circle of life. They instinctively know its compelling force, and that that force will increase; they know that in no long time it will declare war upon, crucify, and finally kill their selfish and pleasure-seeking sensual personalities. As they hardly or rarely recognize that this force is a part of their own nature and pregnant with promise of great joy for them in the future when it shall be their only guiding power, that it is as it were a dawn gloriously lying athwart the purple hill-tops portending a new and spacious day, they are disposed to revolt as a man naturally prepares to revolt when he hears of the coming of something which he instinctively feels to have the power or intention to control what he has hitherto regarded as a right.
But this gloriously ominous disturbing element keeps up its knocking at every heart. Made into words the unwelcomed voice says: "Thou shalt not sacrifice thy higher life to thy lower; thou shalt not sacrifice the welfare of any other thing which hath life to thine own pleasure."
It is a trying utterance, a notice to quit, served on all the baser elements in humanity. It is served into unwilling hands; therefore the star of great hope that is arising does so to the accompaniment of the roar of cannon, the muttered omens of coming disaster, and on every hand the cries of misery and starvation as a result of the last ferocious grabs of self-seeking, lust, and plunder. The collective demon of humanity like the demon of the individual man is roused to its utmost by the very thought, even unconscious, that it may have to loose its hold.
What is this new ideal as a last and highest point of the ever upcoming tide of life?
It is the true instinct of Brotherhood, to be carefully distinguished from that which prompts the mere grouping of selfish units with a common scheme of plunder or imposition. Now that Nature has evolved man, all her further work lies in ennobling his consciousness.
As an embodiment of that impulse, here stands the Universal Brotherhood Organization, the Crown of highest human endeavor, the outer symbol of the Spiritual Temple to which through the painful ages of human struggles and persecutions and tears and blood has been added, here and there, a brick. No other Body known among men has so pure a platform, has an ideal so high and so catholic. It is the Crown of life because it expresses and embodies the last and noblest product of the evolutionary life-wave, the pure compassionate and joyful instinct of Brotherhood. Before that, Nature tended to make her units self-seeking; in man she now pushes on to a nobler step. The fruit, the divine fruit, of countless aeons of evolutionary growth is in the breast of the man who loves his fellow-man. His life is a more rarified essence and distillation of the common life of lesser men.
It is to conserve and give an instrument for work to this essence that the Universal Brotherhood Organization exists. It exists for no other purpose. It tries to exclude those who have other aims. In no long time it will contain the full number of those who are great enough to be animated with this one purpose; and as the individuals among men come few by few to their true dignity as holders of that purpose they will join that Organization in order to have the use of its many and increasingly many implements of husbandry for labor in the field of life, human and sub-human. The Organization is the Temple in whose courtyard is the well-guarded spring of the waters of life, the water of compassion.
Membership in the Organization is therefore a sacred matter. It is the highest self-conscious expression of life. The highest fire of life, its last essence, should be in the breast of, and in the care of, every member. He drinks his life at a higher source than any who have not the instinct of Brotherhood. Members sometimes leave, and may then become its bitter enemies. There are two or three causes for this. They may have entered from a lower motive than that of Brotherhood. Unless they gain the higher (and to try sincerely and continually to do so is to insure ultimate success), they presently feel themselves out of place, and, often with reviling, depart. Some waste in sensual indulgence, either of thought or deed, that essence of life which they possess, and thus, lowering the whole level, lower it from the highest first. And that highest is Brotherhood, so that their whole impulsion to membership has departed. From this cause, and from the intrusion of ambition, which, as a self-centration, is the opposite of the principle of Brotherhood, many desert their posts.
It is easy to see that the Organization is the highest on earth. A man who can drop his own personal aims and comfort and think only of the comfort and welfare of his wife and children, is counted a good husband and father; he who does likewise by his town is counted a good citizen; he who will do that for his country is praised as a patriot. And all these are the highest types in their several capacities. So therefore he who can take into his heart the vast needs of humanity, making an ideal humanity his ideal, is the flower of evolving nature, the greatest and noblest type of man; those who try to make themselves such are approaching the ideal; having comprehended the mind and purpose of nature; they have resolved to be at one with her, to work with her on themselves and others. For life is one; its purpose is one; its children are one, and the greatest are they who know it, who act on their knowledge that it may become deeper, and who ever seek the highest. For these there can be no failures; in them life pulsates at its richest, and therefore also joy, for joy is in the proportion of life. All these must ultimately find themselves within the Organization; for there they will find their natural comrades and their natural tools and channels of work.
The Organization perceived that it contained within itself one who was of this noble type in a unique degree, one who has succeeded in forswearing personal interests, and who, for this reason and because wisdom comes pari passu with selflessness, was thus fitted to lead the highest expression of the current tide of life, the Universal Brotherhood Organization and Movement. By this one, the engines and methods of work are directed.
To recapitulate. This Movement has organized itself that it may work for the elevation of every department of human life that is worthy and in which elevation is possible. It is a Brotherhood because Brotherhood is life. It is universal because of the community of life. We make a large claim, but we maintain that whoever joins the Organization with the one noble feeling and motive will presently feel an accession of life spiritually, mentally, and even physically; that he will reach a point of growing peace and joy; that he will learn of his own nature and of life in general in a way and to a degree nowhere else possible; and that he will find himself in possession of channels of work in which his every bent and aspiration will find their utmost outlet.
He will have entered on a new life; if he is faithful to his spiritual obligation, without books there will arise in his soul that memory and hope and wisdom which are the privileges of the awakened man. A divine legacy will come to him, the religion which is wisdom concerning nature, Theosophy, the peace-bringer, the key to hope, that Temple of hope which will one day be the abiding-place of all souls and where alone can storm-worn humanity come to rest. With this wisdom in his heart he will go out among men to comfort, to teach, to arouse, to labor, in joy.