Page:The Great Book of Magical Art, Hindu Magic and East Indian Occultism.djvu/393

Rh arcanum to regard the so-called miracles as possible, legitimate of an occult law and power to be practically studied, mastered and applied in universal experience.

Nevertheless, an unbiased and careful consideration of the direct and emphatic teaching of the Christ and his Apostles will convince the most hesitating and conservative mind that they certainly regarded the possession and exercise of this power as the orderly and legitimate result of certain specific mental and spiritual attainments possible to all, and which was the special work to urge upon all.

It will be observed that this specific definition and description of "spiritual gifts" embraces every phase of a legitimate power, knowledge, insight, and mastery ever claimed or sought for by the Magi and Hierophants of the World, and that the great Apostle clearly intimates that they are for and should be experienced by the Master's followers.

It will be further noticed that the source of the new and higher knowledge, wisdom and power here recognized and specifically emphasized as free to all, is applied to the direct and enduement of the spirit (not spirits or angels), but the Supreme and Universal Spirit, from which men, as well as angels, derive their life, their intelligence and their power, and to which, therefore, all alike, the humblest as well as the most exalted, have equal access.

Those who can read between the lines may have observed that far from discrediting wholesale the reported stories and wonders of Eastern Magic, our most advanced scientific reasoners in their more recent utterances appear quite interested in the subject, having come to recognize that there may be such things as natural forces or substances on this planet of ours which have as yet eluded the grasp of the Western science. Forces, which our chemists and our physicians can neither gauge, weigh nor measure; and that there is a possibility that among a subtle race like the Hindoos, which is immeasurably older in civilization and experience than our own, some of these forces may have been discovered even thousands of years ago, and preserved among the wisest of its representatives (adept), who in consequence of such knowledge can perform feats which to one of limited understanding are perfectly miraculous.

Apart from the material progress or outward development which the