Because always, in dealing with the problems of our own time, we are apt to be confused and bewildered by secondary issues that rise up around them, complicating them, perhaps largely clouding them, when we try to understand; whereas if we can catch sight of the underlying principle and study it apart from any difficulties of our own time, we are then able to apply that same principle, as discovered apart from the circumstances of the moment, and in that way there is a hope of applying it more justly amid the more exciting incidents of our own day.

And it is that which I want to do in these lectures--to take our movement as a part of a world series, to study the principles that underlie the whole of that series, to trace out the working of these principles amongst the societies that have preceded us in the spiritual world, and then, having grasped them, to apply them to the solution of the problems of our own time.

For there is a tendency in the Theosophical Society to narrow itself down to its time, instead of trying to widen out the thought of its time.

It is a tendency which we see affecting every religion, every church, every great society, and it is useless to recognise this fact in the history of others unless we apply the fact for instruction in our own.
Now in all the religions of the past, so far as we have any knowledge of them in history or from what are called the "occult records," there is one thing we see in their early days--the presence of happenings regarded as abnormal.

I have used the word "phenomena," but it is a very stupid word.