CHINA AND ROME: THE SEE-SAW


That mankind is a unit;--that the history of the world, however
its waters divide,--whatever islands and deltas appear,--is one
stream;--how ridiculous it is to study the story of one nation or
group of nations, and leave the rest ignored, coming from your
study with the impression (almost universal,) that all that
counts of the history of the world is the history of your own
little corner of it:--these are some of the truths we should have
gathered from our survey of the few centuries we have so far
glanced at. For take that sixth century B.C. The world seems
all well split up. No one in China has ever heard of Greece; no
one in Italy of India. What do the Greeks know about Northern
Europe, or the Chinese about the Indians or Persians?--And yet we
find in Italy, in Persia, in India, in China, men appearing,--
phenomenal births,--evolved far above their fellows: six
of them, to do the same work: Founders of Religions, all
contemporary more or less; all presenting to the world and
posterity the same high passwords and glorious countersigns. Can
you conceive that their appearance, all in that one epoch, was a
matter of chance? Is not some prearrangement suggested,--a
_put-up job,_ as they say: a definite plan formed, and a definite
end aimed at? Then by whom? Can you escape the conclusion that,
behind all this welter of races and separate histories aloof or
barking at each other, there is yet somewhere, within the
ringfence of humankind, incarnate or excarnate, One Center from
which all the threads and currents proceed, and all the great
upward impulses are directed?

Those Six Teachers came, and did their work; then two or three
centuries passed; time enough for the seeds they sowed to sprout
a little; and we come to another phase of history, a new region
in time. High spiritual truth has been ingeminated in all parts
of the world where the ancient vehicle of truth-dissemination
(the Mysteries) has declined; A Teacher, a Savior, has failed to
appear only in the lands north and west of Italy, because there
among the Celts, and there alone, the Mysteries are still
effective:--so you may say the seeds of spirituality have been
well sown along a great belt stretching right across the Old
World. Why? In preparation for what? For something, we may
suppose. Certainly for something: for example, for the next two
thousand five hundred years,--the last quarter, I would say, of a
ten-millennium cycle, which was to end with a state of things
in which every part of the world should be know to, and in
communication with, every other part. So now in the age that
followed that of the Six Teachers, in preparation for that
coming time (our own), the attempt must be made to weld nations
into unities. Nature and Law compel it: whose direction now is
towards grand centripetalism, where before they had ordained
heterogeneity and the scattering and aloofness of peoples.

But Those who sent out the great six Teachers have a hand to play
here: they have to put the welding process through upon their
own designs. They start at the fountain of the cyclic impulses,
on the eastern rim of the world: as soon as the cycle rises
there, they strike for the unification of nations. Then they
follow the cycle westward. To West Asia?--Nothing could be done
there, because this was the West Asian pralaya; those parts must
wait for Mohammed. In Europe then,--Greece?--No; its time and
vigor had passed; and the Greeks are not a building people.
They must bide their time, then, till the wave hits Italy, and
what they have done in China, attempt to do there.

Only, what they had done in China was a mere Ts'in Shi Hwangti,--
because Laotse and Confucius had not failed spiritually to
prepare the ground,--they must send forth Adept-souled Augustus
and Tiberius to do,--if human wisdom and heroism could do it,--in
Italy;--because Pythagoras' Movement had failed.
 

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