H. P. Blavatsky, speaking of those numerous well-intentioned critics who sought to explain her mission to the world, said that: “They know neither themselves nor me.” Perhaps they were too close to the mountain to estimate its height. Perhaps they were still unable to use other standards of measurement than those favored by a world then at the bottom of its cycle of selfishness and materialism. Perhaps, also, they failed to interpret the teacher in the light of the message that she brought, and so to assign to her a fitting place under those eternal laws of human evolution that they professed to recognize and to study. For H. P. B. was not an isolated phenomenon of the nineteenth century. Unrelated to times and eternities, her work has no meaning for us. Unless she represented a continuity of effort, unless she was the latest of a hierarchy of teachers that began with the birth of humanity, then we have slight concern with the philosophy that she taught. For that philosophy was based upon a perpetual law of self-sacrifice, existing from the dawn of time, and varying from age to age only in the manner of its application and the specific needs of its beneficiaries. It represented the spiritual education of the world. It implied successive revelations of spiritual truth, of Theosophy, each adapted to periodic human wants, each related to all others in plan, design, intention. It declared a sequence of spiritual teachers, a sequence governed by precise cyclic laws, and destined ultimately to unveil the totality of Theosophic truth. It is only in the light of that cyclic law that we can understand the portentous movement that began in 1875, under the direction of H. P. Blavatsky, and all other movements, in all other times, to which it was related. Unless we can think in ages instead of by the dwarfed standards of a human life, there can be no real survey of the battlefield, nor comprehension of the great figures that have fought thereon. To understand H. P. B. is to understand what Krishna meant when he said: “I incarnate from age to age, for the preservation of the righteous and for the destruction of the wicked.”
If it is possible, and without presumption, to epitomize the message brought to the world in 1875, it may be described as the message of self-sacrifice, and it was brought by those who had the supreme right to speak and to be heard. Under that illumination we know that self-sacrifice is not one of the adornments of life, but that it is life itself. In the light of that philosophy we know that human evolution, which may be summed up in the discovery of the Self, is not alone through the conflict of blind forces nor through the stresses of a ruthless necessity, but that it is guided, directed, and sustained, by sacrifice. Not in one only, but in a hundred, places is that lesson taught, and if we have failed to receive it, the fault is not with the Teachers, who were also its exemplars, but with ourselves, and to our own loss. From the dawn of cosmic existence the note of self-sacrifice is always dominant and sustained. In the Secret Doctrine we are told that the Solitary Watcher is the “Initiator” and the “Great Sacrifice.”
“For, sitting at the Threshold of Light, he looks into it from within the circle of darkness, which he will not cross; nor will he quit his post till the last Day of this Life-Cycle. Why does the Solitary Watcher remain at his self-chosen post? Why does he sit by the fountain of Primeval Wisdom of which he drinks no longer, for he has naught to learn which he does not know—aye, neither on this earth, nor in its Heaven? Because the lonely, sore-footed Pilgrims, on their journey back to their Home, are never sure, to the last moment, of not losing their way, in this limitless desert of Illusion and Matter called Earth-Life. Because he would fain show the way to that region of freedom and light, from which he is a voluntary exile himself, to every prisoner who has succeeded in liberating himself from the bonds of flesh and illusion. Because, in short, he has sacrificed himself for the sake of Mankind, though but a few elect may profit by the GREAT SACRIFICE.”
Elsewhere, and selecting almost at random—so continuously does the same string vibrate—we are told that it is through the sacrifice of the Dhyan Chohans that Men can reach the Haven of Heavenly Divine Peace:
“Hence tradition shows the celestial Yogis offering themselves as voluntary victims in order to redeem Humanity, which was created god-like and perfect at first, and endow him with human affections and aspirations. To do this they had to give up their natural status, descend on our Globe, and take up their abode on it for the whole cycle of the Maha Yuga, thus exchanging their impersonal Individualities for individual Personalities—the bliss of sidereal existence for the curse of terrestrial life.” (Secret Doctrine 2:257)
If we would understand the purport of the Theosophic revelation as known to us during the present century we must learn to knit it up with all the revelation of the past. We must look upon all spiritual teaching as a unit of continuous effort. We must realize that as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, and that the self-sacrifice of the Manus, of the Dhyan Chohans, of the Solitary Watcher, is the key-note of a vast hierarchy of teachers united for ever in aim, purpose, and teaching. However profound may be our search through the abysses of time that lie behind us we shall never fail to find the records, however dim, of those who claimed that they were “sent,” once more to set athrill the wires of spiritual life, once more to remind men of their origin and destiny, and of the only path through the “limitless desert of Illusion and Matter, called Earth-Life.” We see a long hierarchy of Christs and Buddhas, Masters, Arhats, Adepts, always with the same message, the same teaching, the same insistence upon brotherhood, the same assurances of a vaster knowledge awaiting those who have the courage to claim it. Surely human blindness was never so exemplified as in our failure to recognize a purposed continuity in these efforts, to perceive the Soul of the World behind them all, to pay obeisance to the Law of Great Compassion that is never for long without its witnesses among men. And yet there have been Theosophists in the past, as, lamentably, there are now, who debate among themselves the mission of H. P. B. and venture to sit in judgment upon claims that she was too great to make and upon a precedence that she was too strong to demand. And this with the record of the ages in their sight, with the voice of the ages in their ears! Truly, “They know neither themselves nor me.”
H. P. B. rarely talked about herself. Those who were wise enough to know her could need no help of words. There could, indeed, be no other credential, no other assurance, than the magnitude of her message, and the pain, the persecution, and the obloquy that were her rewards. A blinded world has never yet failed to rear a monument of its hate as a beacon light to generations yet to come, and as a proof that one of the Great Ones had passed that way. They shine all along the pathway of time so that those who fail to recognize the identity of the Wisdom may at least see the identity of the martyrdom.
Of a mighty significance were those last words of H. P. B. in which she resigned her work into the hands of those who should have been strong enough to receive it: “Let not my last incarnation be a failure.” And a failure it must still be unless the bridge of self-sacrifice shall be strong enough to carry Theosophy unchanged and unmutilated across the intervening years until the celestial dial shall mark the new cycle and the new incarnation. It will be done if there be only a few who have so far made Theosophy a living power in their lives that the well-being of the world is greater in their eyes than intellectual knowledge, or personal attainments, or the homage of men. H. P. B. herself, prefacing the greatest collection of archaic teachings ever given to the world, said, “I have here made only a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that ties them.” That “nosegay of culled flowers” was Theosophy to which we can add nothing and from which we can take nothing away.
The clearness of our own vision may therefore be measured by the place in a historic Theosophy that we assign to H. P. Blavatsky and to William Q. Judge. So far as we ourselves have learned the law of service, so far shall we understand the unity and the continuity of the greater service that constitutes the spiritual government of the world, and that has never left humanity without aid and leadership in the slow evolution of self-knowledge. According to our recognition of the eternity of the law of sacrifice, according to our recognition of the identity and the status of its messengers and exemplars, so do we raise ourselves toward them, or build between ourselves and them the dark barriers of egotism that veil the vision of the soul. For that, too, is the Law. Like their forerunners in every age, they have asked for the allegiance not of intellectual attainments nor of mental acquisitions, but of forgetfulness of self, of sacrifice, of devotion to the well-being of all. And those who heard that one supreme message will not be in doubt as to the voices that brought it.