INVISIBLE HELPERS
BY
C. W. LEADBEATER
AMERICAN REVISED EDITION
WITH INDEX
CHICAGO:
THE THEOSOPHICAL BOOK CONCERN
“Krotona,” Hollywood,
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
LONDON:
THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING SOCIETY, 3 LANGHAM PLACE
BENARES: THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING SOCIETY
MADRAS, THE “THEOSOPHIST” OFFICE, ADYAR.
1915
CONTENTS.
PAGE.
CHAPTER I.--THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF IN THEM 5
CHAPTER II.--SOME MODERN INSTANCES 9
CHAPTER III.--A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 18
CHAPTER IV.--THE HELPERS 25
CHAPTER V.--THE REALITY OF SUPERPHYSICAL LIFE 34
CHAPTER VI.--A TIMELY INTERVENTION 39
CHAPTER VII.--THE “ANGEL” STORY 42
CHAPTER VIII.--THE STORY OF A FIRE 50
CHAPTER IX.--MATERIALIZATION AND REPERCUSSION 56
CHAPTER X.--THE TWO BROTHERS 63
CHAPTER XI.--WRECKS AND CATASTROPHES 72
CHAPTER XII.--WORK AMONG THE DEAD 78
CHAPTER XIII.--OTHER BRANCHES OF THE WORK 92
CHAPTER XIV.--THE QUALIFICATIONS REQUIRED 97
CHAPTER XV.--THE PROBATIONARY PATH 108
CHAPTER XVI.--THE PATH PROPER 118
CHAPTER XVII.--WHAT LIES BEYOND 129
INDEX 135
INVISIBLE HELPERS
CHAPTER I.
THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF IN THEM.
It is one of the most beautiful characteristics of Theosophy that it
gives back to people in a more rational form everything which was
really useful and helpful to them in the religions which they have
outgrown. Many who have broken through the chrysalis of blind faith,
and mounted on the wings of reason and intuition to the freer, nobler
mental life of more exalted levels, nevertheless feel that in the
process of this glorious gain a something has been lost--that in giving
up the beliefs of their childhood they have also cast aside much of the
beauty and the poetry of life.
If, however, their lives in the past have been sufficiently good to
earn for them the opportunity of coming under the benign influence of
Theosophy, they very soon discover that even in this particular there
has been no loss at all, but an exceeding great gain--that the glory
and the beauty and the poetry are there in fuller measure than they had
ever hoped before, and no longer as a mere pleasant dream from which
the cold light of common-sense may at any time rudely awaken them,
but as truths of nature which will bear investigation--which become
only brighter, fuller and more perfect as they are more accurately
understood.
A marked instance of this beneficent action of Theosophy is the way in
which the invisible world (which, before the great wave of materialism
engulfed us, used to be regarded as the source of all living help) has
been restored by it to modern life. All the charming folk-lore of the
elf, the brownie and the gnome, of the spirits of air and water, of
the forest, the mountain and the mine, is shown by it to be no more
meaningless superstition, but to have a basis of actual and scientific
fact behind it. Its answer to the great fundamental question “If a man
die, shall he live again?” is equally definite and scientific, and its
teaching on the nature and conditions of the life after death throws
a flood of light upon much that, for the Western world at least, was
previously wrapped in impenetrable darkness.
It cannot be too often repeated that in this teaching as to the
immortality of the soul and the life after death, Theosophy stands
in a position totally different from that of ordinary religion. It
does not put forward these great truths merely on the authority of
some sacred book of long ago; in speaking of these subjects it is not
dealing with pious opinions, or metaphysical speculations, but with
solid, definite facts, as real and as close to us as the air we breathe
or the houses we live in--facts of which many among us have constant
experience--facts among which lies the daily work of some of our
students, as will presently be seen.
Among the beautiful conceptions which Theosophy has restored to us
stands pre-eminent that of the great helpful agencies of nature. The
belief in these has been world-wide from the earliest dawn of history,
and is universal even now outside the narrow domains of protestantism,
which has emptied and darkened the world for its votaries by its
attempt to do away with the natural and perfectly true idea of
intermediate agents, and reduce everything to the two factors of man
and deity--a device whereby the conception of deity has been infinitely
degraded, and man has remained unhelped.
A moment’s thought will show that the ordinary view of providence--the
conception of an erratic interference by the central power of
the universe with the result of his own decrees--would imply the
introduction of partiality into the scheme, and therefore of the
whole train of evils which must necessarily follow upon its heels. The
Theosophical teaching, that a man can be thus specially helped only
when his past actions have been such as to deserve this assistance,
and that even then the help will be given through those who are
comparatively near his own level, is free from this serious objection;
and it furthermore brings back to us the older and far grander
conception of an unbroken ladder of living beings extending down from
the Logos Himself to the very dust beneath our feet.
In the East the existence of the invisible helpers has always been
recognized, though the names given and the characteristics attributed
to them naturally vary in different countries; and even in Europe we
have had the old Greek stories of the constant interference of the
gods in human affairs, and the Roman legend that Castor and Pollux led
the legions of the infant republic in the battle of Lake Regillus. Nor
did such a conception die out when the classical period ended, for
these stories have their legitimate successors in mediæval tales of
saints who appeared at critical moments and turned the fortune of war
in favour of the Christian hosts, or of guardian angels who sometimes
stepped in and saved a pious traveller from what would otherwise have
been certain destruction.