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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued|Col. Olcott Explains|1-75}}
{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued|Col. Olcott Explains|1-75}}
...
“Yes, this knowledge can be communicated, and better still, can be obtained without communication by any person who will take the trouble to dig after the buried crock. The door to the final mysteries swings wide open to every human being who by patient assiduity has won the right to lift the knocker. The charge of ‘secrecy’ lies against every science and art as well as this, for there is a ‘secret’ behind every chemical experiment, every microscopic adjustment, the setting of every type, the making of every article of use or ornament. — nay, even the polishing of a boot, without the discovery of which the result is not attainable. This being so, if your Tom Noddies of correspondents or my numerous other critics fancy that they can absorb Occultism as a blotting-pad does a drop of ink, they are—to put it in the mildest form—asses!
The student of Occultism must realize at the outset that there are two sides to magic—the dark and light, the good and evil, magic and sorcery. The one deals with high and pure spirits, and is employed for beneficent purposes; the other brings its votaries into relations with and ultimately under subjection to the Elementary, and is a curse to its practicers and victims.
Says Eliphas Levi, that splendid writer, who really does come within Dr. Bloede’s category, and cunningly conceals his Jesuitical proclivities beneath the mask of perfect devotion to magic: “There is a true and a false science, a divine magic and an infernal magic. The magician must be distinguished from the sorcerer, the adept from the charlatan. The magician disposes of a force that he knows, the sorcerer endeavors to abuse that of which he is ignorant. The ‘devil’ submits to the magician; the sorcerer gives himself up to the devil. The magician is the sovereign pontiff of Nature; the sorcerer only its profaner. Magic is the traditional science of the secrets of Nature, which came to us from the Magi.”
Occultism does not rob Spiritualism of one of the comforting features, nor abate one jot of its importance as an argument for immortaliiy. It denies the identity of no real human spirit that ever has or ever will approach an inquirer. It simply shows that we are liable to the visits, often the influence, and sometimes the absolute control of a class of invisible but very powerful spirits, whose existence I am the first of American spiritualistic Investigators to warn the sect against. Its philosophy clashes in no sense against the bask discoveries of modern science: but on the contrary, rounds out and completes what without It is a crude magma of the Known and the Unknowable. It completes the demonstration of the law of evolution, and supplies the link that has hitherto been missing from the chain that our philosophical contemporaries have, with so much patience, constructed. Its mission as regards Spiritualism, is to filter, purge, classify and explain, not to play the part of the iconoclast or the Vandal. Through my unworthy mouth, it, for the moment, asks recognition, but soon it will compel the attention of every man capable of thinking for himself, and be taught in every corner of the world by a host of apostles and propagandists. Now it speaks like the whisper of a summer zephyr, soon it will rage about the sectarian temples like the wrathful hurricane, and that creed must be built upon the rocks indeed, if it withstand its furious force. Its friends and adepts abide their time.
{{Style S-HPB SB. HPB note|except belief in “Spirits” – Mr Editor<br>
{{Style S-HPB SB. HPB note|except belief in “Spirits” – Mr Editor<br>