LETTER XV
THE WEAKEST LINK
June 2, 1917.
THERE are in the archives of the Masters of Wisdom certain data relative to the past and future of this country which would make interesting reading could they be published in the newspapers at this time of national crisis.
America is aware of her mission of democracy; but she is not aware of another mission equally potent—that of making the world safe for spiritual culture. I do not mean religion, as the word is ordinarily used; but I mean the culture of the spirit of love—such ideas of love as the world has inadequately grasped from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, grasped and let fall again because those ideas were too warm to be comfortably held by hands cooled in the material labors of selfishness.
America has laid up for herself in the regions beyond the physical a debt—an obligation that is not by any means a treasure in heaven, but which, when the debt is paid, may be a real spiritual treasure. I refer to the armies of souls who once occupied this land as free owners, and who were expelled and disinherited by the expanding civilization which grew up in the place of wigwam and hunting-ground.
Those souls, many of them, desire to return. Many have already returned, and unless some way is open for them to live again the free life to which they were accustomed in the past, they will tend to become a destructive force. They cannot be eliminated so easily now, when they wear white bodies and claim citizenship with you. They are scattered from shore to shore of this wide land. You can tell them by their eagle eyes and their high cheek bones, by their free gait and their love of freedom. They are hard to restrain in factory and counting-house. They are clerks with a difference and laborers with a dream. Many of them have found entrance into the sun-lighted world as the children of European immigrants, for they find it easier to enter the blood of certain other races than the blood of the Anglo-Saxon, for all the Anglo-Saxon love of freedom.
A time may come when these now foreign-blooded primitive Americans will instinctively rebel against the restraining influences that have held them, when they will seek to live over again the old life of nature, even though they have to take it as the kingdom of heaven is said to have been taken.
There is coming a time when love will be needed in this land as it has never been needed before, when “live and let live” must become a law as well as a phrase. Those who long for freedom with Nature can be given that freedom. Conditions may be hard in the great cities.
I am not trying to instill fear into the American heart. On the contrary, I am trying to insure you against fear.
Not long could the wheels of civilization stop turning. But they could stop—for a wink of the Cosmic Eye.
America is going to be saved, and saved in the hour of her greatest danger. What will her greatest danger be? You must think that out for yourself.
Learn to see through the eye of the Planetary Spirit. Your view is too narrow. Where your library stands on shelves is for you the centre of things; but the centre of things is in the heart, and hearts are everywhere. If you think about the race and not about yourself, your heart will be magnified; you will see with the eyes of the heart, and he who sees with the eyes of the heart is wiser than historians or intellectual prophets.
The world must be made safe for love. All men must be provided for in the scheme of the future, all men and women and little children. It is not safe to disregard any, for a chain is as strong as its weakest link, and every link must be made strong.