3 August, 1918
Halls represent the study of light and colour. You understand those two symbols and will be able to read into them a good deal of their meaning. You will realize that the life of learning is only part of this development.
The other side is the life of service, which might be symbolized for you as the growing of the spiritual flower of service. That symbol, I think, also conveys a fairly full meaning to you, though there is much more still behind it than you have yet grasped.
You now have an idea of two principle types of service; the one represented by the hostpital scene, the other at the opposite and highest end of the world of spirit by the temple symbol.
I will try and tell you of the types of service that belong to this intermediate stage of development, the service to which we are trained in the halls of learning.
It is not service to those on earth, except occasionally and incidentally when there is something that we can do for those with whom we are in touch. It is principally service to those who have passed out of the earth life who have not yet begun to develop in spirit.
These would not listen to higher teachers, but those who still are near enough to them in sympathy and are able to remember and partly to share in their somewhat dull interests, are able to help them a little by degrees, to induce them, through friendship, to take those first small steps outward from their own little narrow circle, which are for them so difficult to take.
That is a very bad summary of a task which is very difficult but highly interesting in its many varieties. It is the task of the rescue of the dull, in many ways more difficult than the rescue of the wicked. The dull are like a lighted lantern of which the glasses are so smoked on the inside that no light can shine through. They can only be rescued by those who have learnt to sense the light within although they cannot see it. That elementary metaphor will hold good so far as to say that the glasses cannot be cleaned from without, but only from within.
