The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students

Friends: if you stand on the seashore when the tide is flowing inwards, and if you watch the waves as they ripple up, one after another, each coming a little further than its predecessor, each in turn breaking and making way for its follower—in the inflowing tide you have a picture of the evolving races of mankind. And if you watch the method of the flow, you will notice that that which is the most prominent at the moment is not the one which creeps furthest up the sands. The wave which is breaking into foam, which is rippling over the pebbles, which throws up the broken water, which falls back on to the land and makes music, sound, melody as it breaks—that is the wave which is nearly over; it is the wave whose course is run. But if you watch you will notice that while your attention was caught by the noise of the breaking wave, by the foam of the billow that was almost over, silently, imperceptibly almost, visible only to the eye that watches, another wave is rising behind it, silently, without break, without noise, without attracting attention; but the wave that is rising silently behind the breaker—that is the wave which will follow on the billow that has broken, and will run further up the sands than the breaking wave had gone.

In that familiar picture, which every child who has gone to the seaside knows so well, is a figure of the great tide of evolution, in which races are waves and the ocean humanity itself. And each great wave—the great wave that comes at intervals—is a race, and the smaller waves that come between are the sub-races which the race bears. Just as with the water, so with humanity: as one sub-wave is breaking, having reached its highest point, another is rising silently behind it, which shall rule the world when the breaking wave has spent its force. Then, from time to time, to those who have eyes to see, on the crest of the breaking wave appears the mighty angel that we call the Spirit of the Age, and his feet are on the wave, and his locks mingle with the rays of the sun, and he cries out in a voice of thunder: Behold I make a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness shall dwell.

In such a day, in such a time, we of the present age are living. The wave of the sub-race to which we all belong, or nearly all of us, that is breaking on the shore of time; the wave behind it of the race that shall be, to whom the new heaven and the new earth shall be a habitation—that is the race which is coming to the birth, which, in its turn, shall rule this changing earth. For many and many a century, nay, even for millennia, the slow course of evolution goes on quietly without much observation, and then suddenly comes a change—a change of a dying and a birthing race, a transition stage, a transition age in which all movement is rapid, in which catastrophes are frequent, in which sudden changes make themselves felt, in which men grow in a year more than their forefathers grew perhaps in a century. In such a transition age again the world is standing at the present time. Behind us, the long centuries through which the great Aryan race has been sending out wave after wave of humanity in successive billows, sweeping over Asia and over Europe, one after another rising, growing, ruling, and then passing to its fall. During all the time of a sub-race, the world rolls down what have been called the grooves of change, steadily, quietly, without much of jolt or of trouble; the wheels running fairly smoothly, continuously, with little of shock. And then, again, the time comes when a new sub-race must be born, when another shall succeed and the old shall pass away.