To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

15
Who Will Save Us?
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WITNESSED unspeakable tyrannies
of soul and body. It is as though an Armageddon were
in process before our eyes, between the altruistic urgings of
the heart and the selfish demands of the personal nature,
between the creative energies and the destructive, the spiritual
and the psychic/material. As evolving beings we either
progress or retrogress, there is no standing still; since every
moment we are either creators or destroyers, it is essential
that periodically we are shocked into a deeper awareness of
our divine purpose.
Ideas are more potent than spears or bombs for shaking
us out of our lethargy, and what could have been more
revolutionary than the revival of ideas long forgotten: of
universal brotherhood, of the oneness of all life, of divinity
rather than matter as the kinetic agency behind evolution?
It is these ideas, injected into the thought-consciousness of
humanity in the nineteenth century, that slowly and steadily
germinated during the twentieth century with mixed results:
on the one hand, arousing a fury of reaction from
entrenched establishments and, on the other, finding response
in the aspirations of earnest men and women of
every age and background.