Towards the close of the last century--I do not mean the one to which we belong, but the century before, the eighteenth--a mighty effort was made, of which the burden fell upon two great personages closely connected with the Lodge, though neither of them, I believe, at that time was a Master--he who was then known as the Comte de St.Germain, who is now one of the Masters, and his colleague in that great task, closely allied to him, of a noble Austrian family, known to us in later days as H.P.B.When those made their attempt to change the face of Europe, they failed, the time not being ripe; the misery and the wretchedness of the epoch, the degradation of the masses of the population, the horrible poverty, the shameful starvation, all these were the rocks on which split, and was broken up into foam, the spiritual wave of which those two personages were the crest.

The karma of that, for the one whom we know of as H.P.B., was the trying and suffering incarnation that she spent amongst us, when she founded, under the order of her Master, the Theosophical Society, and gave her life to it that it might live.

And it was that fact, that the last great spiritual effort had been drowned in bloodshed, it was that which gave her her marked horror of mixing up the spiritual movement with a political effort, which made her realise that before a spiritual movement could be successful in the outer world it must shape, raise, remodel the conscience of those who were affected by it, that it must not dare to put its hand as a whole to any great political or social movement before it was strong enough to control the forces which it evoked.

Hence her shrinking from all idea of this Society plunging, as a Society, into political work or social reform.

Not that individuals of the Society might not do it, not that members of it might not use their best thought and energy in order to bring forward and strengthen any movement which was really for the benefit of mankind; but that the Society as a Society, as the vehicle of this great torrent of life, must not pour that torrent into any physical and earthly vessel, lest again it should break the vessel into pieces, lest again it should put the hands of the clock back, instead of forward, as was done in France.