The Catholic and Puritan Spirit in the Theosophical Society
I want to try to trace out the somewhat difficult subject of the place of the Puritan and the Catholic Spirit in our Society. I want to show that both types are necessary in every great movement; that both have their value and place, yet also their dangers. And if we realise that both are necessary, it may help each type to be tolerant as regards the other, and to see that each has its dangers.
Now, all the world over these two types are found; they are, in fact, two marked temperaments, intellectual and emotional, into which, roughly, you might throw almost all thoughtful and educated people, and even the thoughtless and ignorant, for those also will show similar types, although naturally less attractively, because more extreme, than they may be among the class of people who at least are seeking to understand themselves, and to gain some measure of equilibrium. Looked at from the outside, the Catholic type is certainly the more attractive, and therefore I want to impress upon you the value of the Puritan type; because, being less attractive, its value is more likely to be overlooked. If the Puritan spirit were completely lost, mankind would lack that vigour and strength and tendency to free thought and free judgment which are so essential to human evolution. Unfortunately, it has often been united with a very cold and forbidding exterior; and if we take the two types as we find them in the reign of Charles I., certainly the Puritan is not very attractive from outside—hard, rather sour, forbidding, and austere. But it is not quite fair to judge the Puritan by that type in the reign of the Stuarts. It is not fair to pick out a type at the moment where these two difficulties face it—danger to itself, and the extreme evil of the type it is opposing. It is hardly fair to take that moment for a judgment of the value of the temperament in itself. But even if you take the Puritan of the time of Charles I. and Cromwell, you can hardly help noticing, if you go beyond externals, the extreme moral value of that type amid those difficult and dangerous surroundings. Austere as it was, it was the austerity that was trying to guard itself against continual danger of pollution, and naturally it ran into extremes, as all reactions run, with the inevitable result that another reaction followed on the first, and you had the loose and profligate type of the Court of Charles II. It is the types I want to disentangle from these special manifestations, and, looking at them apart, from all conditions that may emphasise one characteristic or another.