consciousness manifested in the lower animals and that of human
consciousness; again tracing in the human, the ever-widening area of his
cognition of the personal self, and its needs, to the awakening of the soul
and its needs; which needs include the welfare of all living things as an
absolute necessity to individual happiness.

Altruism, therefore, is not a virtue. It is a means of
self-preservation--without this degree of initiation into the boundless
area of universal, or cosmic consciousness, we may not escape the karmic
law.

The revelations, therefore, upon which are founded the numerous religious
systems, are comparable with the many and various degrees of initiation
into THAT WHICH IS.

They represent the degree which the initiate has taken in the lodge.

It may be argued that this fact of individual initiation into the
ever-present truth of Being, as into a lodge, offers no proof that this
earth is to ultimately become a heaven. It may be that this planet is the
outer-most lodge room and that there will never be a sufficient number of
initiates to make the earth a fit dwelling place for a higher order of
beings than now inhabit it. This may, indeed, be true. But all evidence
tends toward the hope that even the planet itself will come under the
regenerating power of Illumination.

All prophecies embody this promise; all that we know of what materialists
call "evolution" and occultists might well name "uncovering of
consciousness," points to a time when "God's will," "shall be done on earth
as it is in heaven."