The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Life Radiant, by Lilian Whiting

Know well, my soul, God's hand controls
Whate'er thou fearest;
Round Him in calmest music rolls
Whate'er thou hearest.

What to thee is shadow, to Him is day,
And the end He knoweth.
And not on a blind and aimless way
The spirit goeth.

—Whittier.
[Pg 1]

THE GOLDEN AGE LIES ONWARD.

"The Golden Age lies onward, not behind.
The pathway through the past has led us up:
The pathway through the future will lead on,
And higher."

The Life Radiant is that transfiguration of the ordinary daily events and circumstances which lifts them to the spiritual plane and sees them as the signs and the indications of the divine leading. Every circumstance thus becomes a part of the revelation; and to constantly live in this illuminated atmosphere is to invest all experiences with a kind of magical enchantment. Life prefigures itself before us as a spiritual drama in which we are, at once, the actors and the spectators. The story of living goes on perpetually. The days and the years inevitably turn the pages and open new[Pg 4] chapters. Nothing is ever hopeless, because new combinations and groupings create new results. The forces that determine his daily life are partly with man and partly with God. They lie in both the Seen and the Unseen. We are always an inhabitant of both realms, and to recognize either alone and be blind to the other is to deprive ourselves of the great sources of energy. The divine aid, infinite and all-potent as it is, capable at any moment of utterly transforming all the conditions and transferring them to a higher plane, is yet limited by the degree of spiritual receptivity in the individual. As one may have all the air that he is able to breathe, so may one have all the aid of the Holy Spirit which he is capable of receiving. Man can never accept so gladly and so freely as God offers; but in just the proportion to which he can, increasingly, lift up his heart in response, to that degree God fills his life with a glory not of earth.

"Man may ask, and God may answer, but we may not understand,
Knowing but our own poor language, all the writing of His hand."
[Pg 5]

Science has discovered the existence of that incalculable energy, the ether, interpenetrated in the atmosphere. Electro-magnetic currents of power beyond all conception are revealed, and when intelligently recognized by some happy genius, like that of Marconi, they begin to be utilized in the service of human progress. Now as this ethereal energy which is only just beginning to be recognized can be drawn upon for light, for heat, for motor power, for communication, just as this hitherto undreamed-of power can be drawn upon for the fundamental needs of the physical world, so, correspondingly, does there exist the infinite reservoir of spiritual energy which God freely opens to man in precisely the proportion in which he recognizes and avails himself of its transforming power. And in this realm lies the Life Radiant. If this transfiguration of life could only be experienced by the aid of wealth and health and all for which these two factors stand, it would not be worth talking about. We hear a great deal of the "privileged classes" and of "fortunate conditions," as if there were certain arbitrary divisions in life defined by impassable boundaries, and that[Pg 6] he who finds himself in one, is unable to pass to another.

Never was there a more fatally erroneous conception. In the spiritual world there are no limits, no boundaries, no arbitrary divisions. Just so far as the soul conquers, is it free. Conquer ignorance, and one enters the realm of education, of culture; conquer vice, and he enters into the realm of virtue; conquer impatience and irritability and bitterness, and their result in gloom and despondency, and he enters into the realm of serenity and sweetness and exaltation with their result in power of accomplishment. The Life Radiant can be achieved, and is within the personal choice of every individual. One may place himself in relation with this infinite and all-potent current of divine energy and receive its impetus and its exhilaration and its illumination every hour in the day. The toiler in manual labor may lead this two-fold life. On the visible side he is pushing onward in the excavation of a tunnel; he is laying the track of a new railroad; he is engaged in building a house; he stands at his appointed place in a great factory,—but is this all? His[Pg 7] real work lies both in the visible and in the invisible. On the one hand he is contributing to the material resources of the world, and he is earning his wage by which to live; on the other hand he is developing patience, faithfulness, and judgment,—quantities of the spiritual man and possessions of the spiritual life which extend the spiritual territory. Faithfulness to the immediate duty creates a larger theatre for duty. There are not wanting examples that could be named of statesmen,—senators, governors, and others in high places, to say nothing of the supreme example of a Lincoln; there are not wanting examples of professional men in high and important places who initiated their work by any humble and honest industrial employment that chanced to present itself at the moment. Conquering this rudimentary realm, they passed on to others successively. Integrity is a spiritual quantity, and it insures spiritual aid. The cloud of witnesses is never dispersed. The only imprisonment is in limitations, and limitations can be constantly overcome. The horizon line of the impossible recedes as we advance. In the last analysis nothing is too sublime or too beauti[Pg 8]ful to be entirely possible. Its attainment is simply a question of conditions. These conditions lie in entering into this inner realm of spiritual energy in which the personal will is increasingly identified with the will of God.

"The lilies fade with the dying hours,
Hushed is the song-bird's lay;
But I dream of summers and dream of flowers
That last alway."

Nor is this only the day-dream of a poet. The summers and flowers that last alway are a very immediate treasure which one has only to perceive, to grasp, to recognize, and to realize. "Surely," exclaimed the Psalmist, "goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever." This dwelling in "the house of the Lord" is by no means a figure of speech. Nor is it to be regarded as some ineffable privilege to be—possibly to be—enjoyed after that change we call death. Its real significance is here and now. One must dwell in "the house of the Lord" to-day, and every day. The "house of the Lord"[Pg 9] is a beautiful figurative expression for that spiritual atmosphere in which one may perpetually live, and in which it is his simple duty both to live and to radiate to all around him.

In these summer days of 1903, in this golden dawn of the twentieth century, the world is echoing with wonder in the discovery of a new and most mysterious force in nature,—radium. Science is, at this date, powerless to analyze or explain its marvellous power. The leading scientists of the world of learning—Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Professor Curie (who, with Mme. Curie, has the honor of being its discoverer)—believe that in radium will be found the true solution of the problem of matter. Radium gives off rays at the speed of one hundred and twenty thousand miles a second, and these rays offer the most extraordinary heat, light, and power. Yet with this immense radiation it suffers no diminution of energy; nor can any scientist yet discern from what source this power is fed. A grain of it will furnish enough light to enable one to read, and, as Professor J. J. Thomson has observed, it will suffer no diminution in a million years. It[Pg 10] will burn the flesh through a metal box and through clothing, but without burning the texture of the garments. The rays given out by radium cannot be refracted, polarized, or regularly reflected in the way of ordinary light, although some of them can be turned aside by a magnet.

Professor Curie has reported to the French Academy of Science that half a pound of radium salts will in one hour produce a heat equal to the burning of one-third of a foot of hydrogen gas. This takes place, it must be remembered, without any perceptible diminution in the radium. It emits heat maintaining a temperature of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above its surroundings. It evolves sufficient heat to melt more than its own weight of ice every hour. Radium projects its rays through solid substances without any perceptible hindrance and burns blisters through a steel case. The light is pale blue. Down in the deepest pitchblende mines, where particles of radium have been hidden away since the creation of the world, they are still found shining with their strange blue light. The radium electrons pass through the space which separates every molecule in a solid body from another. The[Pg 11] scientific theory is that no two molecules in any body, however dense, actually touch. The relative power of radium to the X-ray is as six to one. The rays of radium have one hundred thousand times the energy of those of uranium and over one hundred times the energy of barium radiation. The scarcity of the metal will be understood when it is stated that there is far less radium in pitchblende than gold in ordinary sea water. Radium colors glass violet; transforms oxygen into ozone, white phosphorus to red; electrifies various gases and liquids, including petroleum and liquid air.

Professor Sir William Crookes, the world's greatest living physicist and experimental scientist, said of radium in the June of this 1903:—

"In total darkness I laid a piece of pitchblende—the ore from which radium is extracted—face down upon a sensitized plate, and let it act with its own light for twenty-four hours. The result was a photograph, where the black pitchblende appeared light owing to the emanations from the radium contained in it. The photograph also shows these going off into space from the sides of the specimen.

"Radium is dangerous to handle. Once I carried[Pg 12] a tiny piece of radium in my waistcoat pocket to a soirée at the Royal Society, and on reaching home found a blister in my side. The blisters from radium may take months to get well, as the injurious effect goes so deep. Now I carry a thick lead box just large enough to hold the little brass case in which I keep the radium itself. There it lies—a little, tawny, crystalline patch. There would hardly be a larger quantity together in one box anywhere in England.

"There are several kinds of emanations from radium. Photographs similar to those produced by the Roentgen ray tube and induction coil can be got by means of the emanations from a small quantity of radium. I took a screen made of zincblende, which will phosphoresce when the emanations of radium fall upon it. I then painted upon it, in a solution of radium, the word 'Radium.' In the dark this screen (about three inches by four inches) gives off sufficient light to read by. But the most striking way of showing the emanations is by the little contrivance I call a Spinthariscope. In this a zinc sulphide screen is fitted at the end of a short brass tube, with a speck of radium about a millimeter away from it. Looking in the dark through the lens at the other end one sees a regular bombardment of the screen by the[Pg 13] emanations. The phenomena of radium require us to recast many of our ideas of matter, electricity, and energy, and its discovery promises to realize what for the last hundred years have been but day-dreams of philosophy.

"Although the fact of emission of heat by radium is in itself sufficiently remarkable, this heat is probably only a small portion of the energy radium is constantly sending into space. It is at the same time hurling off material particles which reveal their impact on a screen by luminous scintillations. Stop these by a glass or mica screen, and torrents of Roentgen rays still pour out from a few milligrams of radium salt in quantity to exhibit to a company all the phenomena of Roentgen rays, and with energy enough to produce a nasty blister on the flesh, if kept near it for an hour."

It is hardly possible to contemplate this remarkable element in the world of nature without recognizing its correspondence in the world of spirit. If an element radiates perpetual light, heat, and power with no loss of its own inherent energy, so the spirit can radiate love, sympathy, sweetness, and inspiration with no diminution of its own quality. Science may be unable to recog[Pg 14]nize the medium from which radium is fed; but religion recognizes the medium from which the spirit draws its sustenance in the power of God. The human will merged in the divine will is invincible. There is no ideal of life which it may not realize, and this realization is in the line of the inevitable and is experienced with the unerring certainty of a mathematical demonstration.

Yet, when one comes to examine the actual average attitude of humanity toward this subject of the divine will, one finds it is largely that of a mere gloomy and enforced resignation, even at its best, and, at its worst, of distrust and rebellion to the will of God. It seems to be held as the last resort of desperation and despair, rather than as the one abounding source of all joy and success and achievement.

The average individual holds a traditional belief that he ought, perhaps, to be able sincerely to wish that God's will be done, but as a matter of fact he far prefers his own. The petition is, in his mind, invariably associated with seasons of great sorrow, disaster, and calamity, when, having apparently nothing else to hope for, a prayer is offered for the will of God! It is somewhat[Pg 15] vaguely held to be the appropriate expression for the last emergency, and that it implies resigning one's self to the most serious and irreferable calamity. There is also a nebulous feeling that while the will of God may be entirely appropriate to the conditions and circumstances of the aged, the poor, the unfortunate, and the defective classes, it is the last thing in the world to be invoked for the young, the gifted, the strong, and the brilliant orders of society. It is tacitly relegated to a place in some last hopeless emergency, and not to a place in the creative energy of the most brilliant achievement.

Now, as a matter of profoundest truth, this attitude is as remote from the clear realization of what is involved in the will of God as would be the conviction that the flying express train or the swift electric motor cars might be suitable enough for the aged, and the weary, and the invalid, and the people whose time was of little consequence, but that the young, the radiant, the eager, the gifted, the people to whom time was valuable, must go by their own conveyances of horse or foot under their immediate personal control. This fallacy is no[Pg 16] more remote from truth than is the fallacy that the will of God is something to be accepted with what decorum of resignation one may, only when he cannot help it! On the contrary, the will of God is the infinitely great motor of human life. Its power is as incalculably greater over the soul than that of radium over other elements, as it is higher in the scale of being; as spirit rather than substance; and the Life Radiant is really entered upon when one has come absolutely to merge all his longing and desire into the divine purposes. It is like availing one's self of the great laws of attraction and gravitation in nature. With the human will identified with the divine will, every day's experience becomes invested with the keenest zest and interest. The events that may arise at any moment enlist the energy and fascinate the imagination. The consciousness of union with God produces an exquisite confidence in the wise and sweet enchantment of life; the constant receptivity of the soul to the influence and the guiding of the Holy Spirit make an atmosphere ecstatic, even under the most commonplace or outwardly depressing circumstances. Celestial harmonies thrill the air. In this divine[Pg 17] atmosphere—the soul's native air—every energy is quickened. The divine realm is as truly the habitat of the spiritual man—who, temporarily inhabiting a physical body that he may thus come into relations with a physical world, is essentially a spiritual rather than a physical being—as the air is the habitat of the bird, or the water of the fish. When the divine statement is made, "Without Me ye can do nothing," it is simply that of a literal fact. The gloom, the depression, the irritation that so often prevail and persist in mental conditions, do not arise, primarily, from any outward trial or perplexity; they are the result—the inevitable result—of the soul's lack of union with God; the lack of that rapport between the spirit of man and the divine spirit in which alone is exhilaration and joy. When this union is forged, when the human will rests perfectly in the divine will, one then absolutely knows, with the most positive and literal conviction, that "all things work together for good to them that love God." The assurance is felt with the unchallenged force of a mathematical demonstration. Not merely that the pleasant and agreeable things[Pg 18] work together for good, but all things—pain, loss, sorrow, injustice, misapprehension. Then one realizes in his own experience the significance of the words, "We glory in tribulation, also." One has heard all one's life, perhaps, of "the ministry of sorrow," and similar phrases, and he has become a trifle impatient of them as a sort of incantation with which he has little sympathy. At the best, he relegates this order of ministry to the rank and file of humanity; to those whose lives are (to his vision) somewhat prosy and dull; and for himself he proposes to live in a world beautiful, where stars and sunsets and flames and fragrances enchant the hours, where, with his feet shod with silver bells, he is perpetually conscious of being

He is perfectly confident that every life can be happy, if it will; and he regards sorrow as a wholly stupid and negative state which no one need fall into if only he have sufficient energy to generate a perpetual enchantment. Thus he dances down the years like the daffodils on the morning breeze, singing always his hymn to the radiant goddess:[Pg 19]

pledging his faith at the Altar of Perpetual Adoration that one has only but to believe in happiness and make room for it in his life in order to live in this constant exhilaration. Then, one day, he awakens to find his world in ruins. Sorrow, pain, loss, have come upon him, and have come in the one form of all others that seems most impossible to bear. If it were death, even of the one dearest on earth, he would be sustained by divine consolations. If it were financial deprivation, he could meet it with fortitude and accept Goethe's counsel to "go and earn more." If it were any one of various other forms of trial, he reflects, there would be for his pain various forms of consolation; but the peculiar guise it has assumed paralyzes him with its baffling power, its darkness of eclipse. The element of hopelessness in it,—his own utter inability to understand the cause of the sorrow which is literally a thunderbolt out of a clear sky,—plunges him almost into despair. He had endeavored to give the best, but the result is as if he had given the worst;[Pg 20] he had come to rely on a perfect and beautiful comprehension and sympathy, but he is confronted with the most inexplicable misapprehension of all his motives, the most complete misunderstanding of all his aspirations and prayers. This, or other combinations and conditions of which it may serve as a type, is one of the phases of human experience. If pain were only the inevitable result of conscious and intentional wrong-doing, then might one even learn to refrain from the error and thus avoid the result. But a deeper experience in life, a more profound insight into the springs of its action, reveal that pain, as well as joy, falls into experience as an event encountered on the onward march, rather than as being, invariably, conditions created by ourselves. In the final analysis of being, we may have created the causes sometime and somewhere; but in the immediate sense we fail to discern the trace of our own action. A joy, a radiance undreamed of, suddenly drops into a day, making it a memorable date forever; a joy that transmutes itself into exaltation and a higher range of energy. Naturally, we count such an experience divine,[Pg 21] and offer our gratitude to God, the giver of all blessings. But a tragedy of sorrow, a darkness of desolation impenetrable and seemingly final, also falls suddenly into a day, and inexpressible amazement and incredulity that it can be real are added to the pain. But it is real. The sunshine has vanished; the stars have hidden their light; the air is leaden where once it was all gold and rose and pearl; one is alone in the desert, in a loneliness that no voice sounds through, in an anguish that no human sympathy can reach or sustain. All that made life worth the living has been inexplicably withdrawn; and how, then, shall he live? And why shall he live? he may even question. The springs of energy are broken and his powers are paralyzed. Whatever he has hitherto done, whatever he has tried or hoped to do in the joyous exaltation of the days that have vanished from all save memory, he can do no longer. It is not a question of choice, not a decision that he would not still continue his efforts; but it is the total impossibility of doing so that settles down upon him like a leaden pall. The blind cannot see, the deaf cannot hear, the dumb cannot speak, the[Pg 22] paralyzed cannot walk,—no matter how gladly they would fulfil these functions. So he looks at his own life. His world is in ruins, and he has no power to ever rebuild it again. In such conditions the problem of suicide may arrive like a ghastly spectre to confront the mind. It is a spectre that, according to statistics, is alarmingly prevalent. The statisticians talk of periods of it as "an epidemic." Both science and religion take note of it, discuss its bearing upon life, its tendency and its possible prevention. It is seen as the result of both great and of trivial causes. It is seen to follow a great sin, and to be the—terribly mistaken—refuge of a great sorrow. And the remedy lies,—where? It can hardly lie elsewhere than in a truer understanding of the very nature of life itself. The only remedy will be found in the larger general understanding that life cannot be extinguished. One may destroy his physical body,—he can do that at any moment and by an infinite variety of methods. But he cannot destroy himself. He may deprive himself of the instrument that was given to him for use in the physical world; he cannot escape from the duties[Pg 23] that he should have fulfilled when he had the means of doing so in the use of this instrument we call the body. If science and religion could clearly teach the awful results that follow suicide, the terrible isolation and deprivation in which the spiritual being who has thrown away his instrument of service finds himself, it would be the one effective cure for a demoralizing tendency. If one has sinned, sometime and somewhere must he meet the consequences. He cannot escape them by escaping from his body, and the sooner he meets them, in repentance and atonement, the sooner will he work out to better and brighter conditions. If one encounters disaster or great personal sorrow, what then? One does not throw away all his possibilities of usefulness because he is himself unhappy. If he does do this he is ignoble. Life is a divine dream. It is a divine responsibility, primarily between each soul and God. It is one's business to live bravely, with dignity, with faith, with generosity of consideration and good will, with love, indeed, which is the expression of the highest energy. Yet, with his personal world in ruins, what shall he do? He must learn that supreme[Pg 24] lesson of all time and eternity,—the lesson to accept and to joyfully embrace the will of God as thus revealed to him, in an inscrutable way.

Until he shall learn to accept this experience as divine, and offer his gratitude to God for pain as sincerely as he offered it for experiences of joy and of beauty, he cannot enter upon the Life Radiant. For the radiant life is only achieved through these mingled experiences as all equally accepted from the Divine Power.

"Ah, when the infinite burden of life descendeth upon us,
Crushes to earth our hopes, and under the earth in the graveyard,
Then it is good to pray unto God, for His sorrowing children
Turns He ne'er from the door, but He heals and helps and consoles them.
Yet is it good to pray when all things are prosperous with us;
Pray in fortunate days, for life's most beautiful fortune
Kneels before the Eternal's gate, and with hands inter-folded,
Praises, thankful and moved, the only Giver of blessings."
[Pg 25]

The Life Radiant comes when one can as sincerely thank God for pain as for joy; when, after long groping in the darkness, clinging, indeed, to his faith in God (for without that he could not live an hour, though that faith be totally without sight), he suddenly realizes how a great sorrow has wrought in him a great result; that it has perfected and crystallized all that was nebulous in his faith, and that it has absolutely brought him into perfect rest in the Divine Will; that it has forged that indissoluble link which forevermore identifies his will with the will of God, and thus opens to him a realm fairer far than a "World Beautiful"—even a World Divine. Only in this finer ether is revealed to him the Life Radiant; in the atmosphere made resplendent and glorious by this revelation of the soul's union with God. It is a life only experienced after one who has seen before him the Promised Land is led into the Wilderness instead, and who, standing there in the midst of denial, and defeat, and desolation, can rejoice in the sea of glass mingled with fire through which he must pass. Only in this supreme surrender of the soul to God;[Pg 26] only in this rapture of union with the divine power, lies the Life Radiant. It is a glory not of earth; it is the instant crystallization of an intense and infinite energy that pours itself into every need of the varied human life. It is the igniting of a spark that flashes its illumination on every problem and perplexity. It is the coming to "know God" in the sense meant by Saint Paul, and thus to enter into the eternal life. For the eternal life is not a term that implies mere duration. It implies present conditions. The eternal life is now. It is a spiritual state, and implies the profound and the realized union with God, rather than a prolongation of existence through countless ages. Only the eternal life can thus prolong itself. The life of the spirit is alone immortal.

"The soul looketh steadily forward, creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind her," and "the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed." That union of energy and will which we call the soul is capable of creating a new world every day,[Pg 27] and any adequate perception of the life that now is, as well as that which is to come, suggests consolation for the ills of the day and leads one into the atmosphere of peace and joy.

When one comes into any clear realization of this life of the spirit,—of its infinite outlook, its command of resources,—the entanglement with trifles falls off of itself. Not unfrequently a great deal of time and energy is totally wasted in endeavoring to combat or to conquer the annoyances and troubles that beset one; that weight his wings and blind his eyes and render him impervious and unresponsive to the beauty and joy of life. Nine times out of ten it is far better to ignore these, to put them out of sight and out of mind, and press on to gain the clearer atmosphere, to create the new world. "The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word. Why need you choose so painfully your place, and occupation, and associates, and modes of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible right for you that precludes the need of balance and wilful election. For[Pg 28] you there is a reality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of beauty. If we will not be marplots with our miserable interferences, the work, the society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would go on far better than now, and the heaven predicted from the beginning of the world, and still predicted from the bottom of the heart, would organize itself, as do now the rose, and the air, and the sun."

The poet declares that "sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things," but there is a certain morbidness in even the sensitive delicacy and intensity of feeling that broods too deeply over the past. It is a great art to learn to let things go—let them pass. They are a part of the "flowing conditions." Even the pain and sorrow that result from failures and changes in social relations; loss of friends, the vanishing of friendships in which one had[Pg 29] trusted,—even this phase of trial, which is truly the hardest of all, can be best endured by closing the door of consciousness on it, and creating a new world by that miracle-working power of the soul. Friendships that hold within themselves any permanent, any spiritual reality, come to stay. "Only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline and which does not decline to me, but, native of the same celestial altitude, repeats in its own all my experience." Life has too many claims and privileges and resources to waste it in lamentations. Let one look forward, not backward. Fairy realms of enchantment beckon him on. These "flowing conditions of life" are, really, the conditions of joy, of exhilaration, of stimulus to energy rather than the reverse. They invest each day, each week, each year, with the enchantment of the unknown and the untried. They produce the possibility of perpetual hope, and continuity of hope is continuity of endeavor. Without hope, faith, and courage, life would be impossible; and courage and all power of energy and endeavor depend entirely upon hope and faith. If a man[Pg 30] believes in nothing and is in a state of despair and not hope, his energies are paralyzed. But hope lends wings,—hope and faith are creative, and can both control and change the trend of events. Circumstances are but the crude material, which is subject to any degree of transformation by the alchemy of faith. "When a god wishes to ride, every chip and stone will bud and shoot out winged feet to carry him," and it is hope and faith that give the power of the gods.

There is, perhaps, no adequate realization on the part of humanity of the enormous extent to which the forces in the Unseen mingle with the forces of the Seen, and thus complete the magnetic battery of action. Life approaches perfection in just the degree to which it can intelligently and reverently avail itself of this aid which is a divine provision. It is not only after death that the soul "stands before God." The soul that does not stand before God, now and here, in the ordinary daily life, does not even live at all, in any true sense. "I am come that ye might have life," said Jesus, "and have it more abundantly." It is only as one holds[Pg 31] himself receptive to the divine currents that he has life, and it rests with himself to have it "more abundantly" every day and hour.

This constant communion with Jesus, this living in constant receptivity to the divine energy, includes, too, the living in telepathic communion with those who have gone on into the Unseen world. The spirituality of life is conditioned on so developing our own spiritual powers by faith and prayer and communion with God, that one is sensitive to the presence and responsive to the thought of friends who have been released from the physical life. Shall Phillips Brooks, the friend and helper and wise counsellor when here, be less so now that he has entered into the next higher scale of being? Shall the friend whom we loved, and who was at our side in visible presence yesterday, be less our friend because his presence is not visible to us to-day? Why is it not visible? Simply because the subtle spirit-body is in a state of far higher vibration than the denser physical body, and the physical eye can only recognize objects up to a certain vibratory degree. It is a scientific fact. Musicians and scientists know well that[Pg 32] above a certain pitch the ear cannot recognize sound; it becomes silence. But as Saint Paul says, "there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body," and the spiritual body also has its organs of sight and hearing. Clairvoyance and clairaudience are as natural, when the spiritual faculties are sufficiently developed, as are the ordinary sight and hearing. Even when there is no clairvoyance and clairaudience, in the way of super-normal development, the mind kept in harmonious receptivity to the divine world may be telepathically in more or less constant communion with those in the unseen.

"The power of our own will to determine certain facts is, itself, one of the facts of life," says Professor Josiah Royce. The power of our own will is but another name for spiritual power—that positive force to which all events and circumstances are negative.

"There never was a right endeavor but it succeeded," says Emerson. "Patience and patience, we shall win at the last. We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or[Pg 33] to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life. We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!—it seems to say,—there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize will be the transformation of genius into practical power."

A large percentage of the anxieties and perplexities of daily experience could be eliminated at once and struck off the balance, never to return again, if life were but viewed aright, and held in the scale of true valuations. Nothing is more idle than to sell one's soul for a mess of pottage; for the pottage is not worth the price. Seen in the most practical, every-day light, it is a bad bargain. Not only is it true that a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things that he[Pg 34] possesseth, but, conversely, as a rule, the greater the mass of things the less the life. The spiritual energy becomes clogged and fettered and strangled amid its entanglement with things. The very power of finance, that might and that ought to insure its possessor a certain peace of mind, a liberation from petty anxieties, and a power to devote himself to higher aims, too often reverses this and chains him as to a wheel. Recently there arrived at a fashionable hotel a family whose command of finance might have redeemed every day from the sordid and from any anxious efforts, and enabled them to live in the realm of high thought, of generous and beautiful expressions of sympathy and love to all. Their visit might have made the time a glorified interlude to every one with whom they came in contact by its radiation of hope and happiness and sympathy and good cheer. Instead, each and all, individually and collectively, were entangled in possessions,—weighted down with things, and quite illustrating the terse little couplet of Emerson,—

The things which rode these unfortunate beings—for the multi-millionaires may not unfrequently be so classed—were masses of jewels, that could not be worn and enjoyed because too elaborate to be suitable, and so must be instantly consigned to the safe. Such part of these treasures as were in use, and left in rooms, suffered from losses or theft. They caused more or less vexation, anger, discord, and fret in general to the owners and every one concerned, until the onlooker was ready to exclaim, "If this is the price of diamonds and rubies and pink pearls, and rich and rare gems in general, let one escape the tyranny of purple and fine linen, and take simplicity and its accompanying peace of mind." After a certain limit of ordinary comfort, great possessions seem to enslave rather than to liberate. If the price of costly jewels is peace of mind, as well as a cheque of imposing figures, then, indeed, let one keep his peace of mind, and go without the necklace. It is often curious to see how little imagination goes into the spending of colossal fortunes. The possessors simply build more houses than they can live in; each one has more space and more impedimenta[Pg 36] than he knows what to do with, and the multiplication of all these possessions results in perpetual anxieties, and fret, and worry, until one would prefer a crust and a garret, and his spiritual freedom, to any such life as that entailed by the golden shower of fortune.

"Are you rich? rich enough to help somebody?" There is the test. The diamond and ruby necklace, whose chief use seems to be to incite anxieties, would give some aspiring youth or maiden a college course. The costly ring left carelessly on the bureau, tempting theft, would give a gifted young girl just the study in a musical conservatory that she needs, or would make a young artist happy and encouraged by buying his picture, and some one else might be made happy and helped on to new endeavor by having the gift of the picture. Money can be transmuted into spiritual gifts, and only when thus used is it of much importance in promoting any real comfort or enjoyment or stimulus to progress. The event, the thing, is purely negative, and only when acted upon by force of spirit does it become positive.

Let one go on through the days doing the[Pg 37] beautiful thing in every human relation. Life is a spiritual drama, perpetually being played. The curtain never goes down. The actors come and go, but the stage is never vacant. To inform the drama with artistic feeling, with beauty, with generous purpose, is in the power of every one. It depends, not on possessions, but on sympathy, insight, and sweetness of spirit. These determine the Life Radiant.

The saving grace of life is the power to hold with serene and steadfast fidelity the vision, the ideal, that has revealed itself in happier hours; to realize that this, after all, is the true reality, and that it shines in the spiritual firmament as the sun does in the heavens, however long the period of storm and clouds that obscure its radiance. The tendency to doubt and depression is often as prevalent as an epidemic. In extreme cases it becomes the suicidal mania; in others it effectually paralyzes the springs of action and leaves its victim drift[Pg 38]ing helplessly and hopelessly with the current; and any such mental tendency as this is just as surely a definite evil to be recognized and combated as would be any epidemic of disease. To rise in the morning confronting a day that is full of exacting demands on his best energies; on his serenest and sunniest poise; that require all the exhilaration and sparkle and radiance which have vanished from his possession, and yet to be forced, someway and somehow, to go through his appointed tasks,—no one can deny that here is a very real problem, and one that certainly taxes every conceivable force of will far more than might many great and visible calamities. For all this form of trial is invisible and very largely incommunicable, and it is like trying to walk through deep waters that are undiscerned by those near, but which impede every step, and threaten to rise and overwhelm one.

The poetic and artistic temperament is peculiarly susceptible to this form of trial. In work of an industrial or mechanical nature, a certain degree of will force alone will serve to insure its accomplishment whether one "feels in the[Pg 39] mood" or not. The mood does not greatly count. But in work of any creative sort, the mood, the condition of mind, is the determining factor. And is it within human power, by force of will alone, to call up this working mood of radiant energy when all energy has ebbed away, leaving one as inert as an electric machine from which the current has been turned off?

And yet—and yet—the saving gift and grace of life and achievement comes, in that there is a power higher than one's own will, on which one may lay hold with this serene and steadfast fidelity.

Physicians and scientists have long since recognized that intense mental depression is as inevitably an accompaniment of la grippe as are its physical symptoms, and the more fully the patient himself understands this, and is thus enabled to look at it objectively, so to speak, the better it is for him. The feeling is that he has not a friend on earth, and, on the whole, he is rather glad of it. He feels as if it were much easier to die than to live,—not to say that the former presents itself to him as far the preferable course. So he envelops himself[Pg 40] in the black shadows of gloom, and, on the whole, quite prefers drawing them constantly deeper. And this is very largely the semi-irresponsible state of illness combined with ignorance of the real nature of the malady.

The knowledge of how to meet it with a degree of that "sweet reasonableness" which should invest one's daily living, is knowledge that can hardly come amiss. One must treat it as a transient visitation of those

which are to be exorcised by keeping close to beautiful thought,—to something high, poetic, reverent. "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee" is one of the most practical aids in life. It can be relied upon more fully than the visit of the physician. From the Bible, from the poets, one may draw as from a sustaining fountain. As this intense depression is a mental feature of the disease it must be met by mental methods,—of resolutely holding the thoughts to high and beautiful themes; by allying the imagination with serene and radiant ideals. Emerson is the greatest of magicians.[Pg 41] His words will work marvels. His thought is as luminous as a Roentgen ray.

"Heaven's perfect hour" is sure to sometime dawn if one but keep his face turned toward the morning. "Heaven's perfect hour" is within one's own possibilities of creation, if he live aright and think aright; and with joy and radiance may he make it his perpetual experience; although it is the supreme anomaly in life that the social relations which are designed to offer the profoundest joy, the most perfect consolation for disaster or sorrow, and to communicate the happy currents of electrical energy, are yet those which not unfrequently make themselves the channel of the most intense suffering. There is something wrong in this. The friendships of life, all forms and phases and degrees through which regard and friendship reveal themselves, are the one divinest, perhaps it may be said are the only, part of life on earth that is absolutely divine, and the divine element should communicate perpetual joy. This is the ideal view of the entire panorama of social interchange and social relations, and being the purest ideal, it is also the most intensely and absolutely real. For nothing is[Pg 42] real, in the last analysis, save that which is ideal; and nothing is ideal that is not a spiritual reality. Then the question recurs,—how is it possible, how can it be accounted for that the one phase of suffering which seems past even trying to endure, comes through the sources which should radiate only joy and blessedness?

The old proverb, "Save me from my friends," is founded on a certain basis of fact. "Twenty enemies cannot do me the mischief of one friend," rather cynically, but perhaps not wholly untruly, said Gail Hamilton. For it certainly is not the avowed enemy, or the person to whom one is indifferent, who has the power to greatly harm or pain him. So far as injury goes, Emerson is probably right when he says, "No one can work me injury but myself." Misrepresentation, misinterpretation, there may be, but in the long run truth is mighty, and will, and does, prevail. One need not greatly concern himself with misinterpretations, but, rather, only with striving to live the life of truth and righteousness.

Perhaps one cause of much of the unhappiness and suffering that not infrequently invests relations that should only be those of joy and peace[Pg 43] and mutual inspiration, is an over and an undue emphasis on material things. Now, when viewed in the light of absolute truth, material things are of simply no consequence at all. They do not belong to the category of realities. Money, possessions,—the mere goods and chattels of life,—are, even at their best appraisal, a mere temporary convenience. As a convenience they fill a place and are all very well. As anything beyond that they have no place at all in one's consciousness. Whatever luxury they can offer is simply in using them to the best advantage, and human nature is so constituted that this best advantage is usually more closely connected with those who are dear to one than it is with himself. For himself alone, what does he want that money, mere money, can buy? He wants and needs the average conditions of life, in the "food, clothing, and shelter" line; he needs and requires certain conditions of beauty, of harmony, of gratification of tastes and enlargement of opportunities,—all these are legitimate needs, and are part of the working conditions of life; of the right development and progress which one is in duty bound to make, both for[Pg 44] his own personal progress and as the vantage ground of his efforts for usefulness. Beyond that, the luxury of life lies in doing what the heart prompts. The one heavenly joy of life is in the enlargement of social sympathies; it is in the offering of whatever appreciation and devotion it is possible to offer to those whose noble and beautiful lives inspire this devotion. To have this accepted—not because it is of intrinsic value, not because it is of any particular importance per se, but because it is the visible representation of the spiritual gift of reverence, appreciation, and devotion—is the purest happiness one may experience, and that which inspires him anew to all endeavor and achievement. To have it refused or denied is to have the golden portals close before one and shut him out in the darkness. Why, the heavenly privilege, the infinite obligation, is on the part of him who is permitted to offer his tribute of love and devotion, expressed, if it so chances, in any material way,—and he is denied his sweetest joy if this privilege be denied him. There are gifts that are priceless, but they are not of the visible and tangible world. They are the gifts of sym[Pg 45]pathy, of intuitive comprehension, of helpful regard; and, curiously, these—the priceless and precious—are never regarded as too valuable for acceptance, while regarding the material and temporal, which, at best, are the merest transient convenience, there will be hesitation and pain. And this hesitation arises, too, from the most beautiful and delicately exquisite qualities, but it produces the pain that is

"——the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute."

There is in life a proportion of pain and jarring that is inevitable, probably, to the imperfect conditions with which the experience on earth is temporarily invested; and because of this, all the range of friendship should be held apart as divine, and any interchange of material gifts should not receive this undue emphasis, but be regarded as the mere incidental trifle of momentary convenience, while all the regard and devotion that may lie behind should give its mutual joy as free and as pure as the fragrance of a rose. Of all that a friend may be Emerson so truly says:[Pg 46]—

"I fancied he was fled,—
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again.
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red;
All things through thee take nobler form."

That alone is what all the loves and friendships of life are for,—that through their ministry life may take on nobler form.

But a friendship that is true cannot flee; it is, by its very quality and nature, abiding. It may be silent forever; it may be invisible, inaudible, immaterial, impersonal; but once forged it is of the heavenly life, the heavenly language, and the Word of the Lord abideth forever!

The stress and storm of life, however, fade away very largely before the power of simple love and good will, which is the key to all situations and the solution of all problems. "How shall I seem to love my people?"[Pg 47] asked a French king of his confessor. "My son, you must love them," was the reply. When there is genuineness one does not need to engage in the elaborate and arduous labor of counterfeiting qualities and manufacturing appearances, and it is really easier—to say nothing of its being a somewhat more dignified process—to be what one wishes the world to regard him, than it is to endeavor to merely produce the effect of it.

Doctor Holmes had a bit of counsel for those who were out at sea,—that they should not waste any energy in asking how they looked from the shore; and the suggestion is not an infelicitous one in its general application to life. It is quite enough for one to keep his feet, as best he may, set on the upward and onward way, without concerning himself too much as to the effect of his figure in the landscape. The energy that goes towards attitudinizing is always wasted, while that which expends itself on the legitimate fulfilment of tasks contributes something of real importance to life.

And so, any significance of achievement seems to be exactly conditioned by the degree of energy involved—the finer the energy, the[Pg 48] more potent the achievement. It would seem as if all the noble order of success hinged on two conditions,—the initial one of generating sufficient energy, and the second that of applying it worthily.

The present age is characterized as that in which new forms of force appear,—in both the physical and the spiritual realms of life. What a marvel is the new chemical force, thermite, of which the first demonstration in America was made in 1902, by the Columbia University Chemical Society in New York. Here is a force that dissolves iron and stone. An extremely interesting account of this new energy appeared in the "New York Herald," in which the writer vivifies the subject by saying of thermite:—

"Under its awful lightning blaze granite flows like water and big steel rails are welded in the twinkling of an eye.... The interior of Mount Pelee, whose fiery blast destroyed St. Pierre in a moment and crumbled its buildings into dust, would be cool compared with this temperature of 5400°. It would melt the White Mountains into rivers of liquid fire. Nothing could withstand its consuming power....[Pg 49] And what makes this stupendous force? The answer seems incredible as the claims for the force itself. It is produced by simply putting a match to a mixture of aluminum filings and oxide of chromium, both metallic, and yet, as by magic, a mighty force is instantly created."

"Such are the wonders of chemistry suggesting Emerson's claim, 'Thought sets men free.' By a simple process—flame applied to metal filings—prison bars melt and vaulted dungeons flow like water."

"By chemistry the pale-faced modern Faust, working in his laboratory, makes metals out of clay and many marvellous combinations. What they will do when skilfully proportioned and exposed to heat, the story related gives a hint,—accounting, as it were, for the forces at work in space, creating heat and electricity, making suns burn with indescribable fury, colliding with peaceful planets, mixing their metals in a second of time,—and new worlds seem[Pg 50] to leap into vision, balls of molten fire sweeping through space; vast cyclones of flame, making Pelee a cold-storage vault by comparison. All this seems simple enough as explained by modern chemistry, giving men unlimited power, making them gods, as it were, to first master themselves and then the universe."

This description of the new force, whose intensity is almost beyond realization, is hardly less remarkable than is the energy described; and it lends itself, with perfect rhythm of correspondence, to analysis on the side of the spiritual forces of life. "Cast thyself into the will of God and thou shalt become as God" is one of the most illuminating of the mystic truths. The "will of God" is the supreme potency, the very highest degree of energy, in the spiritual realm, which is the realm of cause, while the outer world is the realm of effects. Now if one may so ally himself to the divine will as to share in its all-conquering power, he partakes of creative power and eternal life, now and here, just in proportion to the degree to which he can identify his entire trend of desire and purpose with this Infinite will. This energy is fairly[Pg 51] typified in the physical world by the stupendous new force called "thermite," and it is as resistless as that attraction which holds the stars in their courses and the universe in their solar relations.

It is a fallacy to suppose that it is a hardship and a trial to live the more divine and uplifting life, and that ease and pleasure are only to be found in non-resistance to the faults and defects of character. The truth is just the opposite of this, and the twentieth century will reveal a fairly revolutionary philosophy in this respect. Heretofore poet and prophet have always questioned despondently,—

as if to wind up hill were the type of trial, and the "descent of Avernus" were the type of joy.

Does the road wind up hill? Most certainly, and thereby it leads on into the purer light, the fairer radiance, the wider view. Does one prefer to go down hill into some dark ravine or deep mountain gorge? It is a great fallacy that it is the hardship of life to live in the best[Pg 52] instead of in the worst. It is the way of the transgressor which is hard—not of him who endeavors to follow the divine leading. The deeper truth is that the moment one commits all his purposes and his aspirations into the Divine keeping he connects himself by that very act with a current of irresistible energy; one that reinforces him with power utterly undreamed of before.

There is no limit to the power one may draw from the unseen universe. "It is possible, I dare to say," says a thoughtful writer, "for those who will indeed draw on their Lord's power for deliverance and victory, to live a life on which His promises are taken as they stand and found to be true. It is possible to cast every care on Him daily, and to be at peace amidst the pressure. It is possible to see the will of God in everything, and to find it not a sigh but a song. It is possible in the world of inner act and motion to put away all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and evil speaking, daily and hourly. It is possible, by unreserved resort to divine power, under divine conditions, to become strongest at our weakest point; to[Pg 53] find the thing which yesterday upset all our obligations to patience, an occasion to-day, through Him who loveth us and worketh in us, for a joyful consent to His will and a delightful sense of His presence. These things are divinely possible."

One very practical question that cannot but confront the world at the present time is as to whether there is any relation between religion, in its highest and most inclusive and spiritually uplifting sense, and the possibility of communication between those in this life and those who have passed through the change we call death and have entered on the next round of experience. It is a fact—albeit a rather curious and unaccountable one—that organized religion, as a whole, has been largely opposed to the idea of possible communication between what is currently termed the living and the dead. Yet when one focusses the question to a matter of personal individuality, it does not stand the test. Take, for instance, the revered name of a man who was universally recognized as one of the greatest spiritual leaders the world has known,—Phillips Brooks. When he was the rector of[Pg 54] Trinity Church, or the Bishop of the Massachusetts diocese, no one who sought his companionship or counsel would have been regarded as being wrong to do so. Now,—always provided that there is full conviction of immortality,—why should it be wrong to seek his companionship or counsel from the unseen life? Death has no power over the essential individuality. Indeed, in being freed from the physical body, the spiritual man becomes only more powerful, and with his power acting from a higher plane of energy. Regarding ourselves as spiritual beings,—and if we are not that we are nothing,—regarding ourselves as temporarily inhabiting a physical body, but in no sense identified with it save as we use this body for our instrument of communication with the physical world; what more logical or natural than that the spiritual being, not yet released from his physical body, should hold sweet and intimate communion with the spiritual being that has been released from this physical environment? Telepathy has already become a recognized law. That mind to mind, spirit to spirit, flashes its messages here in this present life, is a fact attested by too great an array of[Pg 55] evidence to be doubted or denied. Now the spiritual being who is released from the physical body is infinitely more sensitive to impression, more responsive to mental call, than was possible in conditions here. The experimental research and investigation in psychology, as shown in such work as that of Professor Münsterberg of Harvard in the university laboratory, reveals increasingly that the brain is an electric battery of the most potent and sensitive order; that it generates electric thought waves and receives them. Does it lose this power by the change called death? Is this power only inherent in the physical structure? On the contrary, Professor William James has demonstrated with scientific accuracy in his book called "Human Freedom," that this is not the case. If, then, intellectual energy survives the process of death,—and if it does not then there is no immortality,—the communication between those in the Unseen and those in the Seen is as perfectly natural as is any form of companionship or of social life here.

As all kinds of people live, so all kinds of people die, and the mere fact of death is not a transforming process, spiritually. He who has[Pg 56] not developed the spiritual faculties while here; who has lived the mere life of the senses with the mere ordinary intelligence, or without it, but never rising to the nobler intellectual and moral life—is no more desirable as a companion because he has died than he was before he died. And the objection to any of the ordinary seance phenomena is, that whatever manifestations are genuine proceed very largely, if not entirely, from this strata of the crude and inconsequential, if not the vicious, with whom the high-minded man or woman would not have associated in life, and after death their presence would be quite as much to be deplored. Granted all these exceptions. One may sweep them off and clear the decks. Then what remains? There remains the truth of the unity of the spiritual universe; of the truth that the mere change of death is not a revolutionary one, transforming the individual into some inconceivable state of being and removing him, in a geographical sense, into some unrevealed region in space; there remains the truth that life is evolutionary in its processes; that there is no more violent and arbitrary and instantaneous change by the event[Pg 57] of death, than there is in the change from infancy into childhood, from childhood into manhood. There remains the truth that the ethereal and the physical worlds are inter-related, inter-blended; that man, now and here, lives partially in each, and that the more closely he can relate himself to the diviner forces by prayer, by aspiration, by every thought and deed that is noble and generous and true, and inspired by love, the more he dwells in this ethereal atmosphere and is in touch with its forces and in companionship with his chosen friends who have gone on into that world. There is nothing in this theory that is incompatible with the teachings of the Church, with all that makes up for us the religious life. On the contrary, it vitalizes and reinforces that life. This life of the spirit must be in God. Let one, indeed, on his first waking each day, place his entire life, all his heart, mind, and faculties, in God's hands; asking Him "to take entire possession, to be the guide of the soul." Thus one shall dwell hourly, daily, in the divine atmosphere, and spirit to spirit may enjoy their communion and companionship. The experience of personal spiritual companionship between those[Pg 58] here and those on the next plane of life is included in the higher religious life of the spirit while living here on earth. It vivifies and lends joy to it; for the joy of sympathetic companionship is the one supreme and transcendent happiness in life. And to live in this atmosphere requires one absolute and inevitable condition, the constant exercise of the moral virtues,—of truth, rectitude, generosity, and love. The life held amenable to these, the life which commits itself utterly into the divine keeping, is not a life of hardship; the "road that winds up hill" is the road of perpetual interest and exhilaration. It is a fatal fallacy to invest it with gloom and despair. It is the only possible source of the constant, intellectual energy of life, of sweetness, of joy, of happiness.

The only standard which is worthy for one to hold as that by which he measures his life is the divine one illustrated in the character of Jesus. To measure one's quality of daily life by this is always to fall short of satisfactory achievement; and still there is always the realization that its achievement is only a question of persistence and of time. It is the direction in which one is mov[Pg 59]ing that determines his final destination. There is the deepest inspiration to the soul in taking for one's perpetual watchword, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Not that this divine state is attained; but there is perpetual aid in the conviction that one's self—his spiritual self—can "press on to the high calling of God." Man is a divine being; the divine life is his only true life.

The deepest loyalty to the divine ideal involves, however, not only the striving after perfection, but the charity for imperfection. To denounce evil is a part of rectitude; to condemn sin is a moral duty; but to condemn the sinner is not infrequently to be more deeply at fault than is he who thus offended. An illustration of this point has recently been before the public. A New York clergyman preached on Easter Sunday a sermon that was not his own. He gave no credit to its writer. The sermon was published, and a minister of another church, recognizing it, at once proceeded to "expose" the matter in the daily press. Not only did he call public attention to the error, but he did it in a manner that seemed to rejoice in the oppor[Pg 60]tunity; a manner so devoid of sorrow or sympathy as to fill the reader with despair at such an exhibition. Rev. E. Walpole Warren fittingly rebuked the evident malice with which the fault was exposed, and quoted the words of Saint Paul in the injunction: "Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye who are spiritual restore such an one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted." To have gone, in a spirit of love, privately and quietly, and pointed out the error, would have been Christian-like; to exult in it must be described by a very different term. Devotion to truth is good, but it is "speaking the truth in love" that is the ideal. It is even possible to convey questioning, counsel, encouragement, or reproach without the spoken word; to send the message by the law of suggestion from mind to mind. The mental intimation will reach the one to whom it is sent if the conditions for telepathy are observed, for thought is far more penetrative than the Roentgen ray, and the atmosphere is magnetic, and carries it as the wire does the electric current. All these finer conditions are beginning to make themselves felt as practicable forces. Humanity is becoming[Pg 61] "plastic to the spirit touch;" sensitive to those vibrations too fine to be registered by the outward ear.

said Emerson. Thought is the motor of the future. "As a man thinketh, so is he," is one of the most practical and literal truths.

It is only by the divine law that one can measure the ethics of companionship. The frequent experiences in life of broken friendships; of those alliances of good will, of mutual sympathies and mutual enjoyment, that, at last, some way became entangled amid discords and barriers, and thus come to a disastrous end,—such experiences could be escaped were life lived by the diviner standards. Friendship need never deteriorate in quality if each lives nobly. If one conceives of life more nobly and generously than the other, it may become, not a means of separation and alienation, but a means and measure of just responsibility. There are friendships whose shipwreck is on the rock of undue encroachment on one side and undue endurance[Pg 62]—which has not the noble and spontaneous character of generosity—on the other. One imposes, the other is imposed on,—and so things run on from bad to worse, till at last a crisis comes, and those who had once been much to each other are farther apart than strangers. In such circumstances there has been a serious failure,—the failure of not speaking the truth in love. The failure on the part of the one more spiritually enlightened toward the one less enlightened. One should no more consent that his friend should do an ignoble thing than he should consent to do an ignoble thing himself. He should hold his friend in thought to the divine standard. He should conceive of him nobly and expect from him only honor and integrity. "Those who trust us educate us," says George Eliot; and still more do they who hold us in the highest thought draw us upward to that atmosphere through which no evil may pass. Each one is his brother's keeper, and life achieves only its just and reasonable possibilities when it is held constantly amenable to the divine ideal,—when it is lived according to that inspiring injunction of Phillips Brooks:[Pg 63] "Be such a man, live such a life, that if all lives were like yours earth would be Paradise."

Let one put aside sorrow and enter into the joy and radiance. "Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives." If biography teaches any lesson, it is that the events which occur in life are of far less consequence than the spirit in which they are received. It is the attitude of mental receptivity which is the alchemy to transmute events and circumstances into experience, and it is experience alone which determines both the quality and the trend of life. It is in activity; in doing and giving and loving, that the joy of life must be sought. And it is joy which is the normal condition rather than depression and sadness, as health and not illness is the normal state. Disease and sadness are abnormal, and if one finds himself "blue," it is his first business to escape from it, to change the conditions and the atmosphere. The radiant life is the ideal state, both for achievement as well as for that finer quality of personal influence which cannot emanate from gloom and depression. "Everything good is on the highway," said Emerson, and the[Pg 64] first and only lasting success is that of character. It may not be, for the moment, exhilarating to realize that one's ill fortune is usually the result of some defect in his selection, or error in his judgment, but, on the other hand, if the cause of his unhappiness lies in himself, the cause of his happiness may also lie with himself, and thus it is in his power to so transform his attitude to life as to reverse the gloom and have the joy and sweetness rather than the bitterness and sadness of life. Everything, in the last analysis, is a matter of temperament. Nothing is hopeless, for life is infinite, and new factors can be evolved whose working out will create the new heaven and the new earth.

Here, in the earth life, we have it in our power to seize our future destination.—Fichte.

One of the most inspiring injunctions of Saint Paul is that in which he bids us to "lay aside every weight." Poet and prophet have always recognized the weight of the past as a serious problem. One has made all sorts of mistakes; he is entangled in the[Pg 65] consequences of his "errors and ignorances," if not in his sins, and how can he enter on a Life Radiant with this burden? Well does Sidney Lanier express this feeling in the stanzas:—

"My soul is sailing through the sea,
But the Past is heavy and hindereth me,
The Past hath crusted cumbrous shells
That hold the flesh of cold sea-mells
About my soul.
The huge waves wash, the high waves roll,
Each barnacle clingeth and worketh dole,
And hindereth me from sailing!

"Old Past, let go and drop i' the sea
Till fathomless waters cover thee!
For I am living, but thou art dead;
Thou drawest back, I strive ahead
The day to find.
Thy shells unbind! Night comes behind,
I needs must hurry with the wind
And trim me best for sailing."

There is no question but that the past is heavy and hindereth every one. Its "cumbrous shells" cling like dead weights around man, and keep him from the larger, freer life. "Man is not by any means convinced as yet of his immortality," says Sir Edwin Arnold; "all the great religions have in concert more or less positively affirmed[Pg 66] it to him; but no safe logic proves it, and no entirely accepted voice from some farther world proclaims it."

The one proof, of course, so far as absolute evidential demonstration goes, lies in the communication from those who have passed through death. There unfolds an increasingly impressive mass of logical probabilities that point to but one conclusion to every student of science and of spiritual laws. Biology offers its important testimony. The law of the conservation of forces,—of motion and matter,—which is definitely proven by actual demonstration, suggests with a potency which no one can evade that intellect, emotion, and will—the most intense and resistless forces of the universe—can hardly be extinguished when the forces of matter persist. The study of the nature of the ether alone pours a flood of illumination on the theory of an ethereal world,—a theory with which all the known facts of science and psychology accord, and with which they range themselves. Rev. Doctor Newman Smyth says that the facts disclosed by a study of biology, as well as the theories advanced by some trained biologists,[Pg 67] fairly open the new and interesting question whether death itself does not fall naturally under some principle of selection and law of utility for life? "It is of religious concern as well as of scientific interest," he continues, "for us to learn, as far as possible, all the facts and suggestions which microscopic researches may bring to our knowledge concerning the minute processes or most intimate and hidden laws of life and death. For if we, children of an age of questioning and change, are to keep a rational faith in spiritual reality,—strong and genuine as was our fathers' faith according to their light, ours must be a faith that shall strike its roots deep down into all knowledge, although light from above alone may bring it to its perfect Christian trust and sweetness.... The least facts of nature may be germinal with high spiritual significance and beauty."

The twentieth century leads faith to the brink of knowledge. The deepest spiritual feeling must perpetually recognize that faith alone—Christ's words alone—are enough for every human soul; but faith grows not less, but more, when informed by knowledge. When man meas[Pg 68]ures and weighs the star and discovers their composition; when he sends messages without visible means, then he may believe with Fichte, that "here, in the earth life, we have it in our power to seize our future destination." Mr. Weiss objected to any (possible) evidential demonstration of immortality, because (as he said), "If you owe your belief in immortality to the assumed facts of a spiritual intercourse, your belief is at the mercy of your assumption.... It is merely an opinion derived from phenomena." But this reasoning would not hold good regarding any other trend of knowledge; the vital necessity of the soul to lay hold on God and immortality is not lessened, but rather deepened and reinforced by understanding, when knowledge goes hand in hand with faith. And the one supreme argument of all is that a truer knowledge of man's spiritual being—now and here—with a truer conception of his destiny in the part of life immediately succeeding the change of death, would make so marvellous a difference in all his relations on earth, in all his conceptions of achievement, and would, as Sir Edwin Arnold[Pg 69] says, "turn nine-tenths of the sorrows of earth into glorious joys and abolish quite as large a proportion of the faults and vices of mankind."

The Past is heavy with misconceptions of the simple truths of life and immortality as Jesus taught them. The Present seeks to throw off these "cumbrous shells." Death is the liberator, the divinely appointed means for ushering man into the more real, the more significant life, whose degree of reality and significance depends wholly on ourselves; which is simply the achievement—better or poorer—which man creates now and here, in the same manner in which the quality of manhood and womanhood depends wholly on the degree of achievement in childhood and youth. We do not "find," but instead, create our lives. As we are perpetually creating, we are perpetually making them anew. If we must, this year, live out the errors that we made last year, there is an encouragement rather than a penalty in the fact, as this truth argues that if we now enter on a loftier plane and realize in outward life a nobler experience, we shall, next year, or in some future time, find ourselves entirely free from the weight of the errors we have[Pg 70] abandoned, the mistakes we have learned not to make, and the entanglements that our "negligences and ignorances" created. If we have caused our own sorrow, we can cause our own joy. For the Golden Age lies onward.[Pg 71]

DISCERNING THE FUTURE.

As the sun,
Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image
In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in to-day already walks to-morrow.

There exist moments in the life of man
When he is nearer the great Soul of the world
Than is man's custom, and possesses freely
The power of questioning his destiny.

—Coleridge.
[Pg 73]

Think of the power of anticipation everywhere! Think of the difference it would make to us if events rose above the horizon of our lives with no twilight that announced their coming. God has given man the powers which compel him to anticipate the future for something.

The unexpected and the unaccountable play so large a part in human life that they may well incite study. It is not conceivable that man should always remain at the mercy of events without conscious and intelligent choice in selecting and grouping them. Is there no Roentgen ray that will pierce the horizon of the future and disclose to us what lies beyond? Of course it is a sort of stock-in-trade, axiomatic assertion, that if it were intended for man to know the future God would have revealed it to him; and as it is not thus revealed, it is unwise, or unlawful, or immoral to seek to read it. On the same principle and with just as much logic, it might be solemnly declared that[Pg 74] we have no right to endeavor to surprise any of the secrets of the Universe; that if it had been intended for us to know the weight and composition of the stars, to understand the laws that hold them in their courses, or to know what is conquered by the scientist in geology, or chemistry, or anything else, that the knowledge would have been ready made, and as it is not so, it is not lawful for man to explore any of these territories of the unknown. Or this assertion could be carried to a still further absurdity, and construed that if man had been intended to read he would have been born with the knowledge, and have had no need of learning the alphabet; or that if God had intended man to dwell in cities they would have sprung up spontaneously like forests. As a matter of fact, the extending of the horizon line of knowledge in every direction is man's business in this part of life; and why, indeed, if he can weigh and measure the stars in space, shall he not be able to compel some magic mirror to reveal to him his future? As it is, we all tread on quicksands of mystery, that may open and engulf us at any instant. It is simply appalling when one stops[Pg 75] to think of it,—to realize the degree to which all one's achievements, and possibilities, and success, and happiness depend on causes apparently outside his own control. One awakens to begin the day without the remotest idea of what that day holds for him. All his powers of accomplishment, all his energy, all his peace of mind,—even the very matter of life or death hangs in the balance, and the scales are to him invisible and intangible. The chance of a moment may make or mar. A letter, a telegram, with some revelation or expression that paralyzes all his powers; the arrival of an unforeseen friend or guest, a sudden summons to an unexpected matter,—all these and a thousand other nebulous possibilities that may, at any instant, fairly revolutionize his life, are in the air, and may at any moment precipitate themselves.

Is not the next step in scientific progress to be into the invisible and the unknown?

Doctor Loeb conceived the idea that the forces which rule in the realm of living things are not different from the forces that we know in the inanimate world. He has made some very striking and arresting experiments with protoplasm[Pg 76] and chemical stimuli and opened a new field of problems in biology. If the physical universe can be so increasingly explored, shall not the spiritual universe be also penetrated by the spiritual powers of man?

There is no reason why clairvoyance should not be developed into a science as rational as any form of optical research or experiment. Not an exact science, like mathematics, for the future is a combination of the results of the past with the will and power and purposes of the individual in the present, and of those events that have been in train and are already on their way. It is a sort of spiritual chemistry. But it seems reasonably clear that all the experiences on this plane have already transpired in the life of the spirit on the other plane of that twofold life that we live, and they occur here because they have already occurred there. They are precipitated into the denser world after having taken place in the ethereal world. And so, if the vision can be cultivated that penetrates into this ethereal world, the future can thereby be read. It is the law and the prophets.

Now as the present largely determines the[Pg 77] future, the things that shall be are partly of our own creation.

"We shape ourselves the joy or fear
Of which our coming life is made,
And fill our future's atmosphere
With sunshine or with shade."

There are no conditions of being that are not plastic to the potency of thought. As one learns to control his thought he controls the issues of life. He becomes increasingly clear in intuition, in perceptions, and in spiritual vision.

As the planets and the stars and the solar systems are evolved out of nebulae through attraction and motion and perpetual combination, so the present and the future is evolved for each individual out of his past, and he is perpetually creating it. Nothing is absolute, but relative,—"no truth so sublime but that it may become trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts." There is no relationship, no casual meeting, no accident or incident of the moment, however trivial it may seem, but that is a sign, a hint, an illustration of the human drama, perpetually moving onward, and demanding from each and all insight, as well as outlook, and a consciousness of the[Pg 78] absolute realities involved in the manifestation of the moment. "The present moment is like an ambassador which declares the will of God," says the writer of a little Catholic book of devotions; "the events of each moment are divine thoughts expressed by created objects," and the one serious hindrance, it may be, to the acceptance of events in this spirit, lies in the fact of not being prepared for their acceptance. The problem of life, then, resolves itself into the question of so ordering one's course of living as to be prepared to receive the event of the moment; but the entire rush and ceaseless demands of the life of the present form the obstacle in the way of this harmonious recognition. One cannot accept the event of the moment because he is absorbed in the event of yesterday, or last week, and his life is not, thereby, "up-to-date." To be always behindhand is to be under a perpetual and ever-increasing burden. Empedocles under Mt. Etna was no more imprisoned than is the life of to-day which is filled with the things of yesterday. Yet where does the remedy lie? It is the problem of the hour. "In nature every moment is new," says Emerson, and it is[Pg 79] that sense of freshness and exhilaration that one needs in order successfully to enter into the experiences of the present hour.

The world of mechanism keeps pace in the most curiously interesting way with the world of thought. Inventions came as material correspondences to the immaterial growth and demand. When in the middle of the nineteenth century the human race had achieved a degree of development that made swift communication essential to the common life, the telegraph and the ocean cable were invented; or it might rather be said, the laws that make them possible were discerned, and were taken advantage of to utilize for this purpose. The constant developments in rapid transit, in the instantaneous conveniences of telephonic communication, and, latest of all, in wireless telegraphy, are all in the line of absolute correspondence with the advancing needs of humanity.

More than a decade ago Doctor Edward Everett Hale made the prediction in an article in "The Forum" that writing (in the mechanical sense) would become a lost art, and that the people of future centuries would point to us as[Pg 80] "the ancients," who communicated our ideas by means of this slow and clumsy process. According to Doctor Hale's vision, the writing of all this present period would come to be regarded in much the same light as that in which we look at the Egyptian hieroglyphics or the papyrus. At that time the phonograph, if invented, was not in any way brought to the practical perfection of the present, and telepathy was more a theory than an accepted fact; but Doctor Hale has the prophetic cast of mind, and already his theory is more in the light of probability than that of mere possibility. The demands of modern life absolutely require the development of some means of communication that shall obviate the necessity of the present laborious means of handwriting. There is needed the mechanism that shall transfer the thought in the mind to some species of record without the intervention of the hand. Whether the phonograph can be popularized to meet this need; whether some still finer means that photograph thought shall be evolved, remains to be seen. Thought is already photographed in the ether, but whether this image can be transferred to a material[Pg 81] medium is the question. That telepathy shall yet come to be so well understood; its laws formulated as to bring it within the range of the definite sciences, there can be no doubt; but this result can only attend a higher development of the spiritual power of humanity. In its present status telepathy is seen as a result of wholly unconscious and unanalyzed processes that open a new region of life and a new range of possibilities. It is the discovery of a new keyboard, so to speak, in the individual, enabling him to still more "live in thought," and to "act with energies that are immortal." Science is continually revealing the truth that the world, the solar system, the infinite universes are all created as the theatre of man's evolutionary development. As Emerson so truly says, "the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh."

"The Discovery of the Future" was the title of an interesting lecture by Mr. H. G. Wells, given in London early in 1901, before the Royal Institute, in which the subject was speculatively discussed, and in the course of his lecture Mr. Wells said:[Pg 82]—

"Along certain lines, with certain limitations, he argued, a working knowledge of the things of the future was practicable and possible. As during the past century the amazing searchlights of inference had been passed into the remoter past, so by seeking for operating causes instead of for fossils the searchlight of inference might be thrown into the future. The man of science would believe at last that events in A. D. 4000 were as fixed, settled, and unchangeable as those of A. D. 1600, with the exception of the affairs of man and his children. It is as simple and sure to work out the changing orbit of the earth in future until the tidal drag hauls one unchanging face at last toward the sun, as it is to work back to its blazing, molten past. We are at the beginning of the greatest change that humanity has ever undergone. There will be no shock, as there is no shock at a cloudy daybreak. We are creatures of twilight, but out of our minds and the lineage of our minds will spring minds that will reach forward fearlessly. A day will come—one day in the unending succession of days—when the beings now latent in our thoughts, hidden in our loins, shall stand on this earth as one stands on a footstool, and they shall laugh and reach out their hands among the stars."

Mr. Wells is a disciple of Darwin, and he is applying to the life of humanity certain laws of evolution. In this lecture he argued that great men are merely "the images and symbols and instruments taken at haphazard by the incessant, consistent forces behind them. They were the pen nibs which fate used in her writing, and the more one was inclined to trust these forces behind individuals, the more one could believe in the possibility of a reasoned inductive view of the future that would serve us in politics, morals, social contrivances, and in a thousand ways."

The lecturer argued that "a deliberate direction of historical, economic, and social study toward the future, and a deliberate and courageous reference to the future in moral and religious discussion, would be enormously stimulating and profitable to the intellectual life."

One incalculable aid in thus throwing a spiritual searchlight forward and discussing the future is the realization embodied by Dr. Lyman Abbott, that there is no death, and no dead; that the entire universe is life; and that we are encompassed round about by invisible companions and friends; sustained, guided, helped by forces that we see not.[Pg 84]

Saint Paul tells us that "spiritual things are spiritually discerned." The future is visible to the spiritual sight. No one doubts but that the future is known to God, for it is He who creates and controls it. And man is the child of God, and his true life is in co-operating with God in every form of the higher activity. So far as he may co-operate with God he becomes, himself, a creative force; making, shaping, and determining this future, and thus, to an increasing degree, he becomes aware of it, or sees it, before it is realized on the outward plane. The day is not, indeed, distant, when humanity will live far less blindly than now. As man develops his psychic self and lives the life of the spirit,—the life of intellect and thought and purpose and prayer, rather than the life of the senses, he will perceive his future. To just the degree that one lives in the energies which are immortal does he perceive the future. Knowledge penetrates into the unknown and the unseen. Leverrier postulated Neptune long before his "long-distance" theory was verified. The intelligent recognition of the unseen forces[Pg 85] and unseen presences, the intelligent conception of the manner in which these unseen forces are working out the problems of destiny, alone enables one to consciously combine with them; to enter into the processes of evolution as an intelligent factor, and thus redeem his individual life to harmony, beauty, and happiness.

The question confronts one as a very determining problem in life,—can man control his circumstances? To go deeper still, can he create them? Or is he the product of his environment? Is every life just that which it is made? Or does there work, under all our human will and endeavor, a force resistless as gravitation and as constant as attraction? A writer, considering this subject, thus expresses his own convictions:—

"I believe that every life is the exact and necessary outcome of its environment, and that there is in reality not one particle of actual freedom in this respect from the cradle to the grave. I cannot here go into any extended proof of my position. The syllogism may be stated as follows:[Pg 86]

"Every phenomenon is the necessary result of pre-existing causes:

"Life is but a succession of phenomena.

"Therefore every life is necessarily determined by pre-existing causes.

"I do not see how the conclusion can be escaped that from the time we open our eyes upon the world and receive our first impressions, we are thrust forward between insurmountable walls of fate that leave no room for freedom. It is true that so far as external or objective forces are concerned we may be, as a rule, under no compulsion to follow one more than another; but subjectively we are in no sense free, because the peculiar way in which the will will act under given conditions must depend upon the preponderating subjective force. To hold otherwise is to contend that a lesser force can overcome a greater,—which is absurd."

Certainly the problem as to the degree to which environment determines life is an interesting one, but may it not be reversed and stand as the problem to what degree life controls and fashions the environment? Does not the environment change with the life in a corresponding evolutionary process? "Every spirit builds[Pg 87] its house." Then, too, the thing we call life is not composed exclusively of character and circumstances. There enters into it a third element,—that of the unknown.

The environment of Tennyson, for instance, in his early youth, was that of the limited, even though thoughtful and refined life of the son of a country clergyman of modest means; as his powers expanded and developed his environment kept pace with it in extension of breadth. Is it not, then, true that a life really belongs to the environment it creates for himself, rather than to that in which it is first nurtured? "It doth not yet appear what we shall be" applies to the possibilities of life in the present as well as in that future which lies beyond the change we call death. The divine electric spark leaps through the atmosphere and communicates its kindling power. The inner force of the spirit works outward and begins to shape and fashion its own world. Environment is simply another name for that series "of the more stately mansions" that each one may build according to the power that worketh in him. A great sorrow comes; or an overwhelming joy, on which one rises to[Pg 88] heights of ecstasy, to the very Mount of Transfiguration itself, and thus transcends all former limits and creates his new environment, whose walls are transparent to the sunrise flame and through which the glory enters in. What has he to do with that far-away, opaque, limited environment into which he was born? No more than has the giant oak, tossing its branches under the stars, to do with the acorn cup out of which it sprang. Let one realize, ever so faintly, even, the miracle of possibilities that may unfold, and his life is uplifted into a richness and a peace, and a serene confidence that carries with it the essential essence of all that is best and noblest in its past, and all that is potential in its infinite future. The problem evolves into a definite work to be fulfilled, and this work, in turn, leads to another problem involving its demonstration, in actual performance, as well; and by this alternation life progresses,—growing ever larger and deeper and more exalted with its increasing power. In this way man produces his circumstances—creates his outer conditions. His successive environments become the expressions of his inner life[Pg 89] and energy in their series of development and growth.

But this growth, this development, may be stimulated or retarded. It depends entirely upon the degree to which one may relate himself to the spiritual energy of the divine atmosphere, ever ready to pour itself, with unlimited power, through every receptive channel. And this energy is the Divine Will, and entering into it man does not lose his own free choice, but only enters into that which makes his conscious choice vital and magnetic with infinite power of achievement.

Maurice Maeterlinck offered a fascinating contribution to this range of discussion, in the course of which he said:—

"One would say that man had always the feeling that a mere infirmity of his mind separates him from the future. He knows it to be there, living, actual, perfect, behind a kind of wall, around which he has never ceased to turn since the first days of his coming on this earth. Or rather, he feels it within himself and known to a part of himself; only, that importunate and disquieting knowledge is unable to travel, through the too narrow channels[Pg 90] of his senses, to his consciousness, which is the only place where knowledge acquires a name, a useful strength, and, so to speak, the freedom of the human city. It is only by glimmers, by casual and passing infiltrations, that future years, of which he is full, of which the imperious realities surround him on every hand, penetrate to his brain. He marvels that an extraordinary accident should have closed almost hermetically to the future that brain which plunges into it entirely, even as a sealed vessel plunges, without mixing with it, into the depths of a monstrous sea that overwhelms it, entreats it, teases it, and caresses it with a thousand billows."

Time and space are the two dimensions which differentiate the physical and the spiritual worlds; the higher the degree of spiritual development and advancement, the less is the individual limited and hampered and fettered by these two conditions. One may get a certain analogy on it by realizing to how much greater extent the infant or the child is bound by the conditions of Space and Time than is the man or the woman. To the child the idea of the next year is, practically, an eternity; while the man calmly and confidently makes his plans for[Pg 91] the next year, or for five years or ten years later; with a matter-of-course assurance. The next year to the man is not so remote as the next day is to the child. So by this analogy it is not difficult to realize that when one is released from the physical world and advances into the realm of the subtle and potent forces of the ethereal world, with his faculties responsive to the larger environment,—it is not difficult to realize that he is increasingly free from these conditions that are so strong in their power of limitation over the mortal life.

"It is," continues Maurice Maeterlinck, "quite incomprehensible that we should not know the future. Probably a mere nothing, the displacement of a cerebral lobe, the resetting of Broca's convolution in a different manner, the addition of a slender network of nerves to those which form our consciousness,—any one of these would be enough to make the future unfold itself before us with the same clearness, the same majestic amplitude as that with which the past is displayed on the horizon, not only of our individual life? but also of the life of the species to which we belong. A singular infirmity, a[Pg 92] curious limitation of our intellect, causes us not to know what is going to happen to us, when we are fully aware of what has befallen us. From the absolute point of view to which our imagination succeeds in rising, although it cannot live there, there is no reason why we should not see that which does not yet exist, considering that that which does not yet exist in its relation to us must necessarily have its being already, and manifest itself somewhere. If not, it would have to be said that, where Time is concerned, we form the centre of the world, that we are the only witnesses for whom events wait so that they may have the right to appear and to count in the eternal history of causes and effects. It would be as absurd to assert this for Time as it would be for Space,—that other not quite so incomprehensible form of the twofold infinite mystery in which our whole life floats."

The latest progress in this new century is that of overcoming space. It is being overcome; it is being almost annihilated. When on the Atlantic Coast we call up a friend in Chicago and speak with him any hour; when we cable across three thousand miles of water and receive[Pg 93] a speedy reply; when wireless telegraphy wafts its message through the etheric currents of the air; when the electric motor is about to revolutionize all our preconceived ideas of distance and journeyings,—we see how space is being dominated and is no longer to be one of the conditions that limit man's activities. To a degree, overcoming space is also overcoming time. In an essay of Emerson's, written somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century, he speaks of something as being worth "going fifty miles to see." Fifty miles, at that time, represented a greater space than three thousand miles represent at the present. Regarding the condition of space Maeterlinck further says: "Space is more familiar to us, because the accidents of our organism place us more directly in relation with it and make it more concrete. We can move in it pretty freely, in a certain number of directions, before and behind us. That is why no traveller would take it into his head to maintain that the towns which he has not yet visited will become real only at the moment when he sets his foot within their walls. Yet this is very nearly what we do when we[Pg 94] persuade ourselves that an event which has not yet happened does not yet exist."

The only explanation of certain phases of the phenomena of life is in the theory that life is twofold; that what we call life—in the sense of experiences and events and circumstances—is simply the result, the precipitation into the physical world, of the events and experiences that have already occurred to us on the spiritual side of life, and that they occur here because they have occurred there. Maeterlinck says further (in this paper entitled "The Foretelling of the Future"): "But I do not intend, in the wake of so many others, to lose myself in the most insoluble of enigmas. Let us say no more about it, except this alone,—that Time is a mystery which we have arbitrarily divided into a past and a future, in order to try to understand something of it. In itself, it is almost certain that it is but an immense, eternal, motionless Present, in which all that takes place and all that will take place takes place immutably, in which To-morrow, save in the ephemeral mind of man, is indistinguishable from Yesterday or To-day." The question is raised by Mr. Maeterlinck as to[Pg 95] whether the clairvoyant who foretells to one future events gets his knowledge from the subliminal consciousness of the person himself. He relates a series of experiences that he had in Paris with all sorts and degrees of the professed seers, and he says:—

"It is very astonishing that others can thus penetrate into the last refuge of our being, and there, better than ourselves, read thoughts and sentiments at times forgotten or rejected, but always long-lived, or as yet unformulated. It is really disconcerting that a stranger should see further than ourselves into our own hearts. That sheds a singular light on the nature of our inner lives. It is vain for us to keep watch upon ourselves, to shut ourselves up within ourselves; our consciousness is not water-tight, it escapes, it does not belong to us, and though it requires special circumstances for another to install himself there and take possession of it, nevertheless it is certain that, in normal life, our spiritual tribunal, our for intérieur,—as the French have called it, with that profound intuition which we often discover in the etymology of words,—is a kind of forum, or spiritual market place, in which the majority of those who have business there come and go at will, look about them and pick out the truths, in a very different fashion and much more freely than we would have to this day believed."

Mr. Maeterlinck reiterates that it is incredible that we should not know the future. The truth is that it is even more than incredible; it is unpardonably stupid, and the great desideratum is to so develop and unfold the spiritual faculties that they will discern the experiences on the spiritual side,—those which will, later on, precipitate themselves into the mortal life, and that will be "knowing the future." That is to say, if we can read our spiritual past, we then know our earthly future; for that which has been, in the inner experience, shall be, in the outer experience. Mr. Maeterlinck says:—

"I cannot think that we are not qualified to know beforehand the disturbances of the elements, the destiny of the planets, of the earth, of empires, peoples, and races. All this does not touch us directly, and we know it in the past, thanks only to the artifices of history. But that which regards us, that which is within our reach, that which is to unfold itself within the little sphere of years, a secretion of our spiritual organism, that envelops us in Time, even as the shell or the cocoon envelops the mollusc or the insect in space; that, together with all the external events relating to it, is probably recorded in that sphere. In any case, it would be[Pg 97] much more natural that it were so recorded than comprehensible that it be not. There we have realities struggling with an illusion; and there is nothing to prevent us from believing that, here as elsewhere, realities will end by overcoming illusion. Realities are what will happen to us, having already happened in the history that overhangs our own, the motionless and superhuman history of the universe. Illusion is the opaque veil woven with the ephemeral threads called Yesterday, To-day, and To-morrow, which we embroider on those realities. But it is not indispensable that our existence should continue the eternal dupe of that illusion. We may even ask ourselves whether our extraordinary unfitness for knowing a thing so simple, so incontestable, so perfect and so necessary as the future, would not form one of the greatest subjects for astonishment to an inhabitant of another star who should visit us....

"Moreover, we must not believe that the march of events would be completely upset if we knew it beforehand. First, only they would know the future, or a part of the future, who would take the trouble to learn it; even as only they know the past, or a part of their own present, who have the courage and the intelligence to examine it. We should quickly accommodate ourselves to the lessons of this new science, even as we have accommodated ourselves to those of history. We should soon make allowance for the evils we could not escape and for inevitable[Pg 98] evils. The wiser among us, for themselves, would lessen the sum total of the latter; and the others would meet them half-way, even as now they go to meet many certain disasters which are easily foretold. The amount of our vexations would be somewhat decreased, but less than we hope; for already our reason is able to foresee a portion of our future, if not with the material evidence that we dream of, at least with a moral certainty that is often satisfying; yet we observe that the majority of men derive hardly any profit from this easy fore-knowledge. Such men would neglect the counsels of the future, even as they hear, without following it, the advice of the past."

Not to know the future is extremely inconvenient, to say the least, and it may present itself as the next most needed advance in progress. The question is in the air; the demand for its solution may increase, and demands penetrate the unknown and reconstruct it for the higher use of man. Meanwhile, as Mr. Maeterlinck continues:—

"Our life must be lived while we wait for the word that shall solve the enigma, and the happier, the nobler our life, the more vigorous shall it become, and we shall have the more courage, clear-sightedness,[Pg 99] boldness to seek and desire the truth.... We should live as though we were always on the eve of the great revelation, and we should be ready with welcome, with, warmest and keenest and fullest, most heartfelt and intimate welcome. And whatever the form it shall take on the day that it comes to us, the best way of all to prepare for its fitting reception is to crave for it now, to desire it as lofty, as perfect, as vast, as ennobling as the soul can conceive. It must needs be more beautiful, glorious, and ample than the best of our hopes. For when it differs therefrom or even frustrates them, it must of necessity bring something nobler, loftier, nearer to the nature of man, for it will bring us truth. To man, though all that he value go under, the intimate truth of the universe must be wholly, pre-eminently admirable. And though on the day it unveils, our meekest desires turn to ashes and float on the wind, still there shall linger within us all we have prepared; and the admirable will enter into our soul, the volume of its waters being as the depth of the channel that our expectation has fashioned."

May it not be that the degree to which one is enabled to dominate his own life in the sense of controlling and selecting and grouping its outer events is[Pg 100] precisely in proportion to the spiritual power that he has achieved? Nor has this spiritual power any conceivable relation to what is currently known as occultism, or a thing to be attained by any series of prescribed outer actions. There has sprung up a species of literature with explicit directions for "concentration" and "meditation" and one knows not what,—directions to spend certain hours of the day gazing upon a ten-penny nail or something quite as inconsequential, and a more totally demoralizing and negative series of performances can hardly be imagined. But all this is not even worth denunciation. The only real spiritual power is that of the union of the soul with the divine.

In these lines lies the secret of all that makes for that mental and moral energy whose union is spiritual power. The question of what happens to one daily and constantly, as weeks and months go on, is the one most practical question of life. In it is involved all one's personal happiness as well as all his power for usefulness.[Pg 101] To feel that this ever-flowing current of events is something entirely outside one's own choice or volition is to stand helpless—if not hopeless—before the spectacle of life. It is out of this aimless and chaotic state that resort is had to the seeking of all kinds of divination, omens, prophecies, and foreshadowings, with the result of more and more completely separating the individual from his legitimate activities and endeavor, and leading him to substitute for spiritual realities a mere false and mirage-like outlook,—and instead of that rational activity and high endeavor that create events and increasingly control their conditions, there is merely an impatient and restless expectation of something or other that may suddenly occur to transform the entire outlook.

The unforeseen events do occur, and they are the crowning gift and grace and sweetness of life. But they are the product, the result, the fine inflorescence of intense spiritual activity, not of stagnation and idleness. "It might almost be said that there happens to one only that which he desires," says Maeterlinck: "it is time that on certain external events an influence is of[Pg 102] the feeblest, but we have all-powerful action on that which these events shall become in ourselves—in other words on their spiritual part, on what is radiant, undying within them.... There are those with whom this immortal part absorbs all; these are like islands that have sprung up in the ocean; for they have found immovable anchorage whence they issue commands that their destiny must needs obey.... Whatever may happen is lit up by their inward life. When you love, it is not your love that forms part of your destiny, but the knowledge of self that you will have found, deep down in your love—this it is that will help you to fashion your life. If you have been deceived, it is not the deception that matters, but the forgiveness whereto it leads, and the loftiness, wisdom, completeness of this forgiveness—by these shall your life be steered to destiny's haven of brightness and peace; by these shall your eyes see more clearly.... Let us always remember that nothing befalls us that is not of the nature of ourselves. There comes no adventure but means to our soul the shape of our every-day thoughts.... And none but yourself shall you[Pg 103] meet on the highway of fate.... Events seem as the watch for the signal we hoist from within."

The inner life that is lived—the life of thought, purpose, aspiration, and prayer—dominates and determines the outer life. It creates it. And when one feels helplessly drifting, at the mercy of events, his only safety lies in a more positive and abounding energy; in deeper purpose and a firmer grasp on his work, a higher and diviner trend to his thought, and a closer clinging to the divine promises.

"In man," says Balzac, "culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a universe invisible and infinite,—two worlds unknown to each other." But one's life always belongs far more to his future than to his past. He is more closely and truly related to that which he shall be than to that which he has been; as the flower, the plant, the tree, is in more intimate and vital relation with the air and sunshine than with the dark ground in which the seed germinated. It retains its hold on the kingdom of the earth, but it has achieved a new and a higher relation with the kingdom of the air. Man's relations[Pg 104] with the invisible and the infinite universe are his truest and most determining relations. And these are governed and are constantly extended by his power of will. The power of will is so akin to the divine energy that it is the power through which, and by means of which, the closest relation with the divine energy can be effected. Man, by the power of will, unites his life with the life of God; he so relates himself to the divine energy that he becomes receptive to it, and when this irresistible force pours itself into his life all nobler realizations become possible; all sublimest aspiration may express itself in the daily quality of life, and fulfil its visions in actual tasks and deeds.

Nothing is ever hopeless. There is no situation nor complication that has not its key simply in lifting up the heart to God; in willing, through prayer, to work, as well as to walk, with Him; and in praying, through power of will brought to bear in all its resistless intensity of aspiration, that the power of God may work through all the conditions of the human life.

The subjective or subliminal self is capable of extending the mental faculties in a way almost[Pg 105] undreamed of by the ordinary consciousness. "There is in the mind a faculty," says a writer on this subject, "which, if it receives the correct impression, is able to correct the mental and physical life of a person and produce a manifest impression on his environment, the secret of which is conscious and concentrated attention under direction of the will of the individual.

"The subjective mind is a distinct entity. It occupies the whole human body, and, when not opposed in any way, it has absolute control over all the functions, conditions, and sensations of the body. While the objective mind has control of all our voluntary functions and motions, the subjective mind controls all the silent, involuntary, and vegetative functions. This subjective mind can see without the use of physical eyes. It perceives by intuition. It has the power to communicate with others without the use of ordinary physical means. It can read the thoughts of others. It receives intelligence and transmits it to people at a distance. Distance offers no resistance against the successful missions of the subjective mind. It never forgets anything, It never sleeps. It is capable[Pg 106] of sustaining an existence independent of the body. It never dies. It is the living soul."

That "distinct entity" which has been called the "subjective mind" is probably more accurately defined as the real person, the man himself, the immortal being who inhabits for a time the physical body. The development of this immortal self by an intellectual and moral and religious progress is the real business of life,—the raison d'être of man's sojourn on earth. There is no more important truth to be grasped at the present time than that this culture and development of the spiritual self, or this spiritualization of life, is in no sense a matter of incantations and mysterious rites, but is only to be achieved through faith in God, through prayer and the constant uplifting of the spirit to the Divine. The inspiration of life lies in the unceasing effort to unite all the conscious inner life with the Divine will and guidance. The problem that presents itself to the instructors of the deaf, dumb, and blind is in this development and liberation of the spiritual self, that the psychic powers may, to some extent, take the place of the outer senses that are closed. The physical[Pg 107] mechanism of communication with the visible world is defective, and that perception, which is spiritual sight, must overcome blindness; that swift recognition which is spiritual hearing must overcome deafness; and the wonderful delicacy and intense keenness that these perceptions develop in those with defective senses is itself an incontrovertible proof of the reality of the inner spiritual being that for a time inhabits the physical body. The observation of the deaf and blind leads one to see that sight and hearing in all people vary in degree, and that a vast number of people are partially defective in these senses, and that all mankind are defective beyond a given point. There are vibrations too fine to be detected by the human ear; and the sight of the eye is, as is well known, entirely limited to a certain degree of distance even in those whose eyesight is the keenest. Clairvoyance and clairaudience are considered as abnormal and phenomenal gifts, and as in no way conceivable, nor even desirable, as general and usual powers for every one. Yet what are they but the sight and hearing of the spiritual man, the development of the powers of the subtle[Pg 108] body transcending those of the physical body? This ethereal or psychic body is in correspondence with the ethereal world. It is formed to be an inhabitant of that world in which it finds itself the moment it is released by death. But if sufficiently developed to take command, so to speak, while here, of the will and the consciousness and all the mechanism of the physical body, it then brings to bear upon practical, daily life all this infinite and irresistible energy of the higher planes with which it is in receptive relation. Then, whether in the body or out of the body matters little in the responsive communion with those who have passed through death. "Could the spiritual vision of the present man be unfolded but for a moment, to realize the mighty forces of nature that will one day be at his command, he would become dizzy at the contemplation of such wondrous possibilities," says a recent writer. "The electro-magnetic energy that holds worlds in their orbits, and neutralizes the power of gravitation, is but one of those powers that awaits the growing genius of man to utilize. The magnetic force is the attractive or centripetal power; the electric force is the[Pg 109] repellent or centrifugal power. A machine will be invented, in the near future, that will combine these into a single electro-magnetic force, and with this force the power of gravitation will be neutralized. Then the world's traffic will be as readily carried in the air as now it is upon the ground. The forces of the Universe await only the dissipation of ignorance, selfishness, and greed to bless and harmonize the world."

The outlook for the twentieth century in its grandeur; in the unfolding and expanding powers of man, and the new and deeper insights into the hidden forces of nature, can hardly be exaggerated. We stand on the threshold of a new heaven and a new earth. The drama of life is to be uplifted to a higher plane, to the realm of beauty and blessedness and radiance and joy.[Pg 111][Pg 110]

THE ETHEREAL REALM.

It is henceforth open to science to transcend all we now think we know of matter and to gain new glimpses of a profounder scheme of cosmic law.

We exist also in a world of ether;—that is to say, we are constructed to respond to a system of laws,—ultimately continuous, no doubt, with the laws of matter, but affording a new, a generalized, a profounder conception of the Cosmos. So widely different, indeed, is this new aspect of things from the old, that it is common to speak of the ether as a newly-known environment. On this environment our organic existence depends as absolutely as on the material environment, although less obviously. In ways which we cannot fathom, the ether is at the foundation of our physical being. Perceiving heat, light, electricity, we do but recognise in certain conspicuous ways,—as in perceiving the "X rays" we recognise in a way less conspicuous,—the pervading influence of ethereal vibrations which in range and variety far transcend our capacity of response.

Within, beyond, the world of ether,—as a still profounder, still more generalized aspect of the Cosmos,—must lie, as I believe, the world of spiritual life. That the world of spiritual life does not depend upon the existence of the material world I hold as now proved by actual evidence. That it is in some way continuous with the world of ether I can well suppose. But for our minds there must needs be a "critical point" in any such imagined continuity; so that the world where life and thought are carried on apart from matter, must certainly rank again as a new, a metetherial environment. In giving it this name I expressly imply only that from our human point of view it lies after or beyond the ether, as metaphysic lies after or beyond physics. I say only that what does not originate in matter or ether originates there; but I well believe that beyond the ether there must be not one stage only, but countless stages in the infinity of things.

The glorious consummation toward which organic evolution is tending is the production of the highest and most perfect psychical life.—John Fiske.

The recognition of the untold force of thought is productive of marvellous results and opens as unlimited possibilities as the discovery and the increasing application of the power of electricity. The force of thought—the most intense potency in the universe—has always existed, as has that of electricity. It only awaited recognition. Telepathy is just as entirely the manifestation of a law as is gravitation; and gravitation existed long before it was recognized. The entire question of the conduct of life is included in the true development and right use of thought. The entire problem of achievement, of success, lies in it. The supreme end of all religious teaching is the culture of right thought. It is the power that determines all social relations, all opportunities[Pg 114] for usefulness, and all personal achievement. The right thought opens the right door. There is absolutely no limit to its power, and each individual may increase and strengthen his grasp of it and develop it to an indefinite and unforeseen degree. One actual method of the use of thought is to use it, creatively, for the immediate future. The time that is just before one is plastic to any impress. It has not yet taken form in events or circumstances, and it can, therefore, be controlled and determined. One may sit quietly and alone for a little time at night, calling up all his thought force, and by means of it create the next day. The events of the day will follow the impression made by the thought. One can thus will himself, so to speak, with the successful currents. He can create his atmosphere and environment, and can open wide the portals of his life to beauty and happiness.

The law of telepathy is as supreme in the spiritual universe as are the laws of gravitation and attraction in the physical universe. The law that holds the constellations in their courses is not more in absolute evidence than that which governs the flashes of perception between two[Pg 115] persons in a finer and more subtle communication than words, spoken or written, could possibly convey. But while there is no law more universally and impressively in evidence, there is also no law so totally unformulated, so entirely, it would seem, outside the domain of conscious recognition and will. One endeavors to send a telepathic message to his friend—and no impress is made. Again, when he has made no effort at all, nor even thought of trying, the telepathic message is received. The magnetic sensitiveness of the spirit to thought currents is astounding. It has long seemed to many persons that the very air conveyed messages—and so it does. One may "call up" another, in either this world or in the ethereal world, at any time, simply by directing to him a strong current of thought. The thousand little things generally ranked as coincidence are really illustrations of this law. One thinks intently of a friend whom, perhaps, he has not met, or heard from, for years, and, presto, a letter, or the person himself appears. One can settle misunderstandings, convey counsel, entreaty, instruction, or comprehension,—all by the quality of the thought he sends forth.[Pg 116] All this is a part of the phenomena of spiritual life. We must not make the mistake of imagining we become spiritual beings only by death. We are spiritual beings now and here, and our real life is, even in the present, in the spiritual world, and carried on by means of spiritual forces. Everything which is intellectual and moral is of the spirit. Such men as Edison and Tesla and Marconi are dealing with the higher spiritual forces. When Cyrus Field laid the Atlantic cable, it was a work of the spiritual rather than of the physical world. So are the vast works of commerce, of transportation, of building, the discovery of new countries, and the promulgation of the higher civilization in every form. We must not regard spiritual life as limited to mere religious or devotional rites and ceremonies. These have their place, and an important one; but they are included among a thousand other things that make up the life of the spirit. Man is primarily and permanently a spiritual being, and only incidentally and temporarily a physical being.

Still the further problem confronts us: How shall we consciously and intelligently control[Pg 117] telepathic communication as we now control our communication by speech, letters, or telegrams? A curious instance of unconscious and unaccountable telepathy is the following: There were two individuals who had never met, but who held some mutually antagonistic conceptions of each other,—conceptions that were, too, perhaps more or less mutually erroneous, and this condition had lasted over a prolonged period of time. Then one of these persons had the experience of waking in the night, simply engulfed in an overwhelming wave of tender and compassionate feeling toward the other: seeing, as if with spiritual vision, a nature unstrung, hardly responsible, and one that invited only the most infinite tenderness and care. This wave of new and perfectly clear perception was like a magnetic trance. It was an hour of absolute spiritual clairvoyance, and the evidence was furnished by a letter received, the next morning, from a mutual friend, which entirely substantiated and corroborated the telepathic impression that had been experienced in the night. Now the scientific question is: From whence did this impression proceed? Was it direct telepathy between the two persons[Pg 118] concerned? Was it a clairvoyant reading of the letter that was en route during the night? Who can decide? The special point here is that these most vivid and intense experiences are largely, if not entirely, encountered unconsciously. They suddenly—come. One asks for them—and they do not come? Now how are we to pluck out the heart of the mystery?

The moment one realizes himself as a spiritual being, belonging by right to the spiritual world; one whose true interests are in and of that realm, and to whom communion with the Divine is the very breath of existence, the one elixir of life, that moment he asserts himself aright. From that hour his life becomes a significant factor in true progress. Prayer may be a formal and ceremonial act, and mean nothing: it may be the absolute surrender of one's soul to the Divine, when it enters behind the veil into the very glory of God. This spiritual truth is closely linked with certain scientific facts. The scientists have theories of inner ether by means of which psychic power is conveyed and which translate it into action, as the wire translates the electric current to express a message. A[Pg 119] scientist asserts a new theory that there are no varying states of ether, but that all space is filled with matter in various states of vibration; and that what we had heretofore called air and ether is simply all one substance in degrees of lower and higher range. It is conceivable that this latest idea may approximate to the truth more than any previous theory. No one has yet discovered those forces of nature by means of which sense relates itself to spirit. There is certainly some great law, still unrecognized and unformulated, which acts, and which is acted upon by human beings, irrespective of any physical means; but why these laws sometimes do and sometimes do not produce given results, no one can tell. There are other existing laws in the physical world that transcend scientific scrutiny. The marvellous results of chemical combinations, the miracle nature of electricity and all its phenomena, fade into absolute nothingness beside the higher marvels of the action of spirit. The crude and merely approximate truth must be that in each human being is a part of the divine being; that this divine element may be nurtured and strength[Pg 120]ened by living in its native atmosphere of spiritual life,—in the atmosphere of peace, joy, and love; and that this potency of God and of man, so far as he relates himself to God, can act upon that substance that fills all space; that this substance, whether it be ether, or whether it be matter differentiated in degree of vibration, is intensely susceptible, in the most infinitely delicate way, to thought, which acts upon it as physical force can act on physical matter. To realize intelligently one's relatedness to God, and one's own power over this subtle matter, whatever it be that fills all space, is to arise in newness of life. It is to realize one's self as a spiritual being, here and now, and an inhabitant of the spiritual world. It is to realize that one's relation to the physical world is a merely incidental thing,—a fact that has its purpose, its responsibilities, as a phase of development, and which it is most important to use aright; but which is inevitably transient.

Day-dreams, the habitual meditations that go on of themselves in the mind, are prophecies and potencies. They are the creative factors of future states. "Out of the heart are the issues of life."[Pg 121]

It is a question of degree,—so much love, so much force to act upon outer affairs. He who finds his currents of thought verging to the unkind, the ungenerous, the inimical; whose mind, in its unconscious action, is in a discordant state, fretting at circumstances, or persons,—is doing himself the gravest injury. He is creating, on the unseen side, which is the most potent and determining side, conditions which he must live out sooner or later.

It would seem, if one may judge from the data of telepathic experiences, that the power belongs to the sub-conscious self, or, as we may prefer to call it, to the spiritual self, and does not relate itself to the conscious intellectual life and the conscious will. If this deduction is true—what then? Can we not relate our consciously intelligent life to our unconscious spiritual life? Not only, indeed, that we may, but that we must,—for it is the next step in spiritual advancement.

The time has come in the era of progress when humanity begins to realize its spiritual development. All the signs of the times point it out. The discoveries of higher laws constantly[Pg 122] being made, are an impressive attestation that register the movement. With the new century came in Tesla's discovery of the vacuum tube and its wonderful light; and hardly a week later came the announcement of the discovery of a perpetual light found by a certain chemical combination placed in a glass globe, which, when the air was exhausted and the globe sealed, would burn as long as the globe lasts. The discoverer claims that there is but one force in all nature,—that of vibration; that all space is pervaded by matter, which is energy. Certainly the world is on the eve of new revelations, and life is to be lifted up, even here and now, to the Divine plane.

Perhaps the most practical counsel in the way of determining one's own future control of these telepathic conditions is conveyed in the words: "Begin now the eternal life of trustful consecration and sanctified service, consciously drawing your innermost life from God."

This absolute personal control of each man over his own future lies in a twofold power: the one being that integrity, moral purpose, aspirations, have a creative power of the most[Pg 123] potent character; and the other being in that one attracts to himself the spiritual companionship and sympathetic co-operation of just such quality as his own. There is an objection, often made to the faith in the companionship and communion with those in the Unseen,—that only those of a lower order in the life beyond death are attracted into the sphere of this world. Nothing could be more remote from the truth. One might as well refuse all social intercourse with those in this world, on the plea that if he have companionship at all it would be of a lower order, and therefore he will have none. Now the order of one's companions and associates depends on himself. If he is noble and exalted, he does not attract nor is he attracted to the base and the unworthy: and only more deeply and unfailingly does this law hold true in the realm of spirit. One attracts to himself from the unseen world companionship of the same order and quality as that of his own spirit, with the exception that in proportion to the purity of his aspiration does this quality of companionship come to him of a still higher order than his own. Thus one creates his own world.[Pg 124] He need not abjectly feel that he must accept sorrow, trial, defeat, and disaster at the moment, because compensation somewhere awaits him. The law of transmutation supersedes the law of compensation. One may bring to bear, at the moment, the potent force that transforms all: that changes dullness into radiance, trial into joy, depression into exaltation. And how? Simply by bringing to bear on the events and conditions of the hour the intense and creative potency of spiritual power. By means of this we shall certainly gain those "new glimpses of a profounder scheme of cosmic law" to which Sir William Crookes refers and which his vision discerns as open to science.

It is a scientific fact that any vibration set up in the ether persists to an unlimited degree, communicating itself to that which is in correspondence with its rate of vibration. This, of course, is the explanation of the phenomena involved in wireless telegraphy, and is equally the explanation of the phenomena involved in telepathy. At a meeting of the Society of Arts in May of 1901, Professor Ayrton,[Pg 125] commenting on Marconi's system, said that we "are gradually coming within thinkable distance of the realization of a prophecy he had ventured to make four years before, at a time when, if a person wanted to call to a friend he knew not where, he would call in a very loud electro-magnetic voice, heard by him who had the electro-magnetic ear, silent to him who had it not. 'Where are you?' he would say. A faint reply would come, 'I am at the bottom of a coal mine, or crossing the Andes, or in the middle of the Atlantic.' Or, perhaps, in spite of all the calling, no reply would come, and the person would then know that his friend was dead. Think of what this would mean, of the calling which goes on every day from room to room of a house, and then think of that calling extending from pole to pole,—not a noisy babble, but a call audible to him who wants to hear, and absolutely silent to all others. It would be almost like dreamland and ghostland,—not the ghostland cultivated by a heated imagination, but a real communication from a distance, based on true physical laws."

Yet even this speculation fails to keep pace[Pg 126] with the advance of truth, for there is no death, in the sense in which Professor Ayrton refers to it here, as a state of unconsciousness which no message can reach, and from which no reply can come. On the contrary, that transformation we call death is a condition of far more intense consciousness, of being far more alive and far more responsive to the call and the thought. We are learning to realize the literal truth of the phrase in the Bible, "dead in trespasses and sins." So far as one is in sins and faults and defects he is dead. Spiritual vitality is in goodness alone. So far as one endeavors to follow after righteousness, to achieve and live in truth, honor, and love, he is alive; so far as he fails in this he is dead, and this, quite irrespective of the fact as to whether he is in or out of his physical body. This present world has its dead people walking around, it is true: eating, drinking, dressing, travelling, taking part in the average activities of daily life, but dead, all the same, or, at most, only partially alive,—the "dead souls," as Gogol well terms them. The vital truth of immortality is to be immortal now, to-day; to be spiritually alive, spiritually con[Pg 127]scious, and with this achieved, whether in or out of the body is immaterial. That becomes a mere detail of no special significance. Given the condition of spiritual vitality, and the electro-magnetic call would receive its reply from the friend who had "shed" his body.

"If any of the planets be populated (say Mars) with beings like ourselves, having the gift of language and the knowledge to adapt the great forces of nature to their wants, then if they could oscillate immense stores of electrical energy to and fro in electrical order, it would be possible for us to hold communication, by telephone, with the people of Mars."

It is hardly a bolder or more startling speculation to contemplate the establishment of intelligent and definite communication with Mars than it would have been, a half-century ago, to contemplate communication across three thousand miles of ocean without visible means. An evening's observation of the heavens, made recently through the great telescope of the Naval Observatory in Washington, revealed, in one of its[Pg 128] phases, a sunrise in the moon. One gazed at the dark edge of a mountain range to see it suddenly grow light; to see the illumination increase both in area and intensity, precisely like a sunrise over a mountain range here on earth. The spectacle was as suggestive as it was sublime. It brought the observer into a new relation to the universe. The sun that lights the earth was then rising on the moon. One realized a new conception of the unity of the solar system.

Now it is this unity in the universe that scientists are everywhere affirming. This is the new note in science, and it is only one aspect of this truth to realize that wireless telegraphy and telepathy are both manifestations of the same principle,—that of setting up a magnetic disturbance in the ether, by utilizing the electricity in etheric currents. Thought is the most potent form of energy, and given the conditions of a certain rapport between two minds, and the result is the same as that discerned and verified by Marconi, in setting up two instruments that are attuned to each other.

In the end telepathy will take entire precedence of all other forms of communication. It[Pg 129] will supersede the telegraph, the telephone, the cable, and wireless telegraphy. It will serve every demand, public and private. Distance will interpose no obstacle or difficulty, for thought overcomes space and time.

We are spiritual beings here and now. We are living in a spiritual universe. We are entering in more and more to the grasp and knowledge of spiritual appliances, and we can only say, reverently, that "it doth not yet appear what we shall be."

Is thought, itself, photographed on the ether? Does the vibration of the spoken word linger in the place where it is uttered? The question cannot but recur to one after recognizing phenomena that, apparently, point to this solution,—when, for instance, a caller comes, and, taking the chair of a preceding guest, repeats, substantially, the same words that the other had spoken regarding some subject or event. This is something that frequently occurs. Just what is the explanation? Do thoughts register themselves magnetically on the air, and is this magnetic writing perceived, unconsciously, by one sensitive to it? The question is certainly one of curious interest.[Pg 130]

Again, are the daily occurrences of life pre-destined? How far do we make our own life? How far is it made for us? An individual was led in dreams one night through rooms that seemed to have granite walls, to be very bare, cold, and vast. The next evening he was leaving on a journey, and did start; but after he had taken his seat in the palace car, the discovery of a mistake caused him hastily to leave the train before it started, and return. In consequence of the mistake discovered he was obliged to seek a certain official in a great granite building, whose interior had, heretofore, been entirely unknown to him. Entering it, his way led through the same cold, vast, bare rooms that the preceding night in dreams he had traversed. Now the mistake that delayed his journey and brought about these results was not even his own mistake, but one made by another person. Was all this series of events—trifles of no importance in themselves, but very curious in their combination—foreordained? and if not, how was it that they were partly perceived, in the passive state of sleep, twenty-four hours before they occurred? It often seems true that the spirit,[Pg 131] in the unconscious condition of sleep, has a certain clairvoyance, and looks out beholding and reporting to the consciousness the immediate future; but if the events it reports were not already formed, how could they be seen? The question involves many psychic complexities.

There can be little question that the atmosphere is electric, magnetic, and conducts thought from mind to mind, as the wire does the electric current. The higher spirituality to which the race has advanced enables one to perceive and experience this truth more or less, some to a great degree, some only in a minor; but some sort of perception is universal, and is seen as phenomena, or as indications of the working of spiritual laws, according to the individual who recognizes it. One of these striking phases may be seen in the experience that results from absence and separation. Let two persons who are mutually sympathetic and responsive to each other meet, and they at once strike the chord of ardent social enjoyment in their companionship, and the note of prelude to an enthusiastic friendship. Let a sudden separation come in the external world, and the mutual spiritual experience[Pg 132] is strangely full of color, of vital sympathy, of vivid perceptions. Evidently, the spirits of each meet and mingle, independent of the fact that a thousand miles of distance lie between the individuals. What is distance to the spiritual being? It is not an element which bears any significance to that part of the nature which has transcended time and place. In such an experience as this, and one that occurred recently between two persons, one writes to the other:—

"I talk to you incessantly. I find currents from my life continually running out like telegraph wires to yours."

And a letter written by the other person, crossing this one on the way, had borne a message something to the effect:—

"I go about companioned by you. Far more actually present you are to me than those by whom I am surrounded. Everything I read and think keeps referring itself to you for response."

Between these two persons telepathy was working perfectly. Absence and separation made no blank, but rather a season filled with the most intense and direct sense of psychical communion. They were meeting—spirit to[Pg 133] spirit—more closely, more clearly, indeed, than would have been possible had they been dwelling under one roof. For personality, and all the incidents and accidents and interruptions hinder rather than help actual companionship, when it is on this higher plane of spirit to spirit in mutual, swift, unerring response.

In this phase of actual experience may we not find a hint from which to study the words of Jesus to his disciples,—"It is expedient for you that I go away." Through that mystic silence that fell between them on His departure from the visible world, there thrilled the sense of a communion so near, so exalted, so divinely sweet, that it could never have been theirs in the external life. To give this it was expedient that He should go away. Here we find the key to the separations that must occur between friends by the demands of life, or that occur by death, but that may be in either case infinitely deeper in spiritual communion. The friend with whom we are in any real relations is nearer, even when the ocean rolls between, than one in the same room can be with whom we are not in special sympathy; and one who has gone into the invisible[Pg 134] world is nearer still, as out of the realm of pure spirit the communion is still stronger and more direct and more intense. For this is "a universe of reciprocal forces." The very ether is the medium of communication between spirit and spirit.

Marconi has recently completed a new wonder in the shape of a ship detector. By means of this instrument the course of any ship having one aboard can be traced, wherever she may be in mid-ocean. It acts on the principle of the wireless telegraph, but does not require a wireless plant to operate it. No operator is needed on the ship, the shore stations locating the ships by a system of tunings. It is proposed to install this system on the leading liners, and the home office can thus know at every moment the exact position of a ship and note her progress as she moves along her course. Should the vessel become disabled it will become noted, and by means of the chart her position can be known and assistance can be sent to her.

Here is one of the most marvellous among the new illustrations of the finer forces. But this "ship detector," which acts on the principle of[Pg 135] wireless telegraphy, is less potent than are the electric forces in every human being, if it were known how to control and utilize these to serve the purposes of perception. For perception is a faculty that may far transcend both sight and hearing. Perception is a faculty of the soul—often undeveloped; rarely developed to anything like its full possibilities, but capable of locating objects or of discerning persons and events, or of apprehending states of mind in others, regardless of space, as the ship's detector and the shore stations become aware of each other through their relation of finer vibrations. A recent experimenter in electric and super-physical force, M. Tessier d'Helbaicy, states this theory: "Taking as his premise the fundamental law of physical science, that all chemical reaction is accompanied by a generation of heat and electricity, he said to himself that the human body, with the innumerable and incessant chemical reactions presented by all its cells, should create a thermo-electric pile of great power. In any case, the Austrian savant, Reichenbach, in his remarkable series of experiments, has already proved, fifty years ago, that we radiate electric[Pg 136] waves of a special kind, visible in the dark under certain conditions, and these present positive and negative poles." This being granted, M. d'Helbaicy has measured the yielding power of the human machine in heat and electricity, and has compared these with what the heat industrial machines can do, such as those run by steam, dynamos, and electric piles.

The new year of 1903 was inaugurated by the scientific success of the most remarkable, the most marvellous achievement of any age,—that of wireless telegraphy. "Before you write 1903 I will have demonstrated the success of wireless communication," exclaimed Marconi, early in 1902; and ten days before the dawning of the year he named, the achievement was an undisputed success. It is so marvellous a thing that thought, without visible mechanism, can be flashed through the air, across the ocean, and record itself, that the success of Marconi can be held as nothing less than sublime. It is the most impressive of all the realizations of the past decade in entering on the unseen and intangible potencies. It has become a familiar thing to see the cars in[Pg 137] city streets, and carriages move swiftly by a motor power that is invisible to the eye; a power that no one can analyze or detect save in its effects and its results. It has become so familiar a thing that one can carry on a conversation with a friend at a thousand miles' distance, that one forgets how wonderful it really is. Within the memory of men still living is the time when it required forty days to make the voyage to Europe, and to obtain, or to send, news between the two countries. Now, within forty minutes, the news is flashed under the ocean. All these discoveries that annihilate Time and Space are simply the result of the evolution of life to higher stages; of the advance of man into the ethereal realm. For is not the underlying and fundamental truth this: that all is spirit? One may talk of "the spiritual life," but there is no other life! Withdraw the spiritual element, and there is no life at all! The difference, then, between the physical and the material worlds is only a difference of degree,—as ice-water, steam, and vapor are only different degrees and conditions of the same element. Progress is the transformation of the[Pg 138] physical into the spiritual; of the lower and cruder and denser life into the finer, the more potent, the more ethereal. Energy is proportioned in potency to its ethereal aspects. In its cruder and denser form there is only a low degree of potency, and in its more ethereal forms is there higher potency. The ox-team is a dense and crude form of potency, and the electric motor is the more ethereal and intense form of energy. Now the progress of humanity is unfailingly registered by its advance into the employment of the ethereal forces and the more intense energies, as these form conditions that react upon life. How far more intelligent a nation may be when its facilities for swift intercommunication foster and stimulate and instantly disseminate the knowledge of all events, discoveries, and experiences; and when its facilities for swift transportation facilitate all economic and social intercourse! Judged, then, by their unfailing measurements, how significant was the triumphal achievement of wireless telegraphy on the eve of the dawn of 1903.

If telepathy is "the science of the soul's interchange with God—of the interchange of the[Pg 139] thought of one soul with another;" if it "reveal that realm of consciousness where all God's thought is interpreted to the soul:" if "its vibration never dies out of the atmosphere of thought;" the discovery of this great law must indeed take precedence of that of any other achievement of the past century.

The nature of Human Personality holds the secret of spiritual evolution. It doth not yet appear what man may be; but the increasing knowledge of his powers; the development of those heretofore latent and unrecognized, are combining to throw a new illumination on not only the aspects, but the purposes of life. Man is coming into enlightenment concerning the environment of the spiritual world as one more immediately controlling him, as well as one far more profound and significant, than the environment of matter and of ether. As things go, the chief emphasis has always been placed upon the material environment. Man has not infrequently been willing to sell his soul for a mess of pottage—his chief concern being, not the loss of his soul, but the gain of the pottage. He has been willing to exchange the entire[Pg 140] devotion of all his energies for a finer and more resplendent quality of food, clothing, and shelter,—for a palace in which to live, for private cars and steam yachts in which to go about, and all the paraphernalia accessible to the multi-millionaire. But it is not all that these possessions typify which constitutes his most important environment. It is that degree of the spiritual world with which his own quality of spiritual life is fitted to ally itself. "The life of the organism consists in its power of interchanging energy with that of its environment," says Frederic W. H. Myers,—"of appropriating by its own action some fraction of that pre-existent and limitless power. We human beings exist, in the first place, in a world of matter," he continues, "whence we draw the obvious sustenance of our bodily functions. We exist also in a world of ether; that is to say, we are constructed to respond to a system of laws, ultimately continuous, no doubt, with the laws of matter, but affording a new, a generalized, a profounder conception of the Cosmos. On this environment our organic existence depends as absolutely as on the material environment,[Pg 141] although less obviously,—but ... within, beyond the world of ether, as a still profounder, still more generalized aspect of the Cosmos, must lie, as I believe, the world of spiritual life."

This world of spiritual life, a deeper reality, a profounder realm of energy than the ethereal world, is the true environment of the spirit even while embodied in physical form; and the secret of all success, of all achievement, of all progress, of all happiness, is to discover increasing means by which we may thus relate ourselves to our native realm. Science and Psychical Research are supplementing Religion; are, indeed, incorporating themselves into Religion as vital factors of the spiritual progress of humanity. Far from being hostile elements to the revelation of the Divine Power given in the Bible, they explain, they extend, they interpret that revelation. As Archdeacon Wilberforce so finely points out, God is ever the same, "but what men see of Him changes,—changes without contradiction of the past conceptions."

"It was a definite promise of God that He should unfold, develop, spiritualize the concep[Pg 142]tions of the early Christian faith, revealing gradually, as men should be able to assimilate them, higher, nobler views of the nature, character, and purpose of the Eternal Father," continued Archdeacon Wilberforce in a memorable sermon preached in Westminster Abbey, and he added:—

"It is, I suppose, inevitable that timid hearts, rooted in the traditions of the past, iron-bound in antiquated definitions, should imagine that the foundations of faith are shaken. They forget that the Christ told us that when His visible presence was removed He would speak by His spirit, as He had only delivered the preliminaries of His full message; that there were truths yet to be unfolded which men would receive and assimilate as the generations succeeded one another,—'as the thoughts of men widened with the progress of the suns.' I have been told by experts that the astronomers who built those marvels of antiquity, the Pyramids of the Nile, pierced a slanting shaft through the larger pyramid which pointed direct to the Pole-star, and that in those days had you gazed heavenward through the shaft into the Eastern night, the Pole-star alone would have met your eye. It was in the ages of the past, it was when the Southern Cross was visible from the British Isles. Slowly, imperceptibly, the orientation of the planet has changed. Did you[Pg 143] now look up into the midnight sky through the shaft in the Great Pyramid you would not see the Pole-star; new brilliant space-worlds would shine down on you. But the heavens have not altered, and the shaft of the pyramid is not guilty, so to speak, of unorthodoxy. A new view of the heavens has quietly come, for the earth's axis has changed its place. Similarly, it is the work of the spirit of the ascended Jesus to advance the axis of the Church of God from glory to glory. Conceptions of the Universal Soul once prominent before the telescope of human faith and aspiration grow, enlarge, expand. He changeth not; He is ever the same. And these conceptions will change until knowledge, in the sense of the acquisition of facts, shall be no more, and intuitive perception of the transcendent majesty of the Universal Life shall fill our souls forever."

In these latter days one may hold all his old faith and add to it knowledge, as Saint Paul himself enjoins. One of these powers of the spiritual man now being rapidly developed is that of telepathy. We shall learn to talk in thought, as well as in oral speech. We shall learn to "call up" the friend at a distance, or the friend in the Unseen, as unmistakably as we now call up a friend by telephone. Time and Space are the limits which define the terrestrial life as dis[Pg 144]tinct from the celestial. But man is, primarily, a celestial being. He is, first of all, a spirit, belonging to the spiritual world, and only secondarily and temporarily a denizen of earth. He can regain, to some extent, at least, his celestial faculties. For centuries he has accepted imprisonment in the senses. His release is at hand. He has but to assert his own pre-eminence as a spiritual being with spiritual powers. He has but to exert these in order to prove to himself their existence, and to develop them to their increasing use. Extension of power over the material universe, more wonderful and more potent, and more all-comprehending than even Marconi's wonderful wireless telegraphy, is at hand. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be;" but that man can create and control his destiny to an increasing extent, is true. It is the evolution of religion,—of that faith which has added to itself knowledge. Thought is the highest manifestation of energy; and when man learns to live in thought he acts upon all his environment with energies that are immortal.

Professor Leavenworth of the State University Observatory in Minnesota photographed the new[Pg 145] asteroid Eros at a distance estimated to be some thirty-six millions of miles,—a distance that renders it impossible to discern this planet even through the strongest telescope. Exact mathematical calculation had worked out the problem of the location of Eros, and the sensitive photographic plate caught it, even though it is beyond the power of the telescope.

This scientific fact illustrates perfectly the way in which an unseen universe exists about us, registering its existence on the sensitive plate of spiritual impression. Science has long since established the truth of the different rates of vibration that characterize different things. The reason that the psychic (or spiritual) body of those who have passed from the physical to the ethereal world is unseen is simply that the ethereal body is in a state of vibration too high for the eye to follow. Stephen Phillips expresses a deep scientific truth when he says:—

"I tell you we are fooled by the eye, the ear;
These organs muffle as from that real world
That lies about us."

Yet in every human being there lies latent the inner sight and the inner hearing, which can be[Pg 146] increasingly developed by psycho-physical culture; by such habits of life as make the physical body more flexible, more subtle, and which thus raise to a far higher rate its degree of vibration, and enable the organs of sight and hearing to be far less "muffled" than they are in those who live more in the mere life of the senses. This unseen world that lies about us may be explored; the unseen friends who encompass us may be recognized by those who will so live as to develop the psychic senses, and so as to allow the psychic body to take greater control of its physical instrument; this unseen world is simply the natural continuation of the physical universe in the scale of evolution. Science is every day penetrating its space, and the horizon line of mystery constantly recedes. What is wireless telegraphy but one of those marvels which a decade ago we should have considered as quite beyond the horizon line of our experimental knowledge, and as belonging to the unrevealed mysteries of the spiritual universe? The ordinary trolley car of to-day—moving without visible means—would have been regarded as a miracle a century ago. There is no hard and fast line between the phys[Pg 147]ical and the ethereal worlds. They melt into one another and are determined only by degrees. Any element may exist as a solid, a liquid, a gas, or in the etheric condition, and one state is no less real than another. The trend of progress is leading humanity constantly into the realm of finer forces; of more subtle forms of expression. The trend of progress is constantly discarding the more ponderous and clumsy for the subtle, the swift, and the more ethereal form of mechanism. Instead of the stage coach, with two, four, or six horses, we have the automobile; instead of the sailing ship, the twin-screw propeller; instead of stoves or fireplaces, with fuel to be carried in and refuse to be carried out, we have the hot-water radiator, and are on the eve of having heat, as we already have light, from electricity.

Now when science provides the explanation of this ethereal universe surrounding and interpenetrating that in which we live and psychic science begins to explore it and formulate its means and methods, there are persons who object on the ground of its "materializing heaven." If one were to inquire as to what this idea of heaven is he would probably receive no more[Pg 148] definite reply than that it was supposed to be a condition of playing on golden harps and waving palm branches. The figurative pictures of the New Testament have largely been accepted as literal ones, and it may be an open question as to which condition would be the more "material," that of walking golden streets, waving branches of palms and devoting one's time to the harp, or the life that prefigures itself as a development and expansion of our present intellectual, artistic, and spiritual life.

"Unless some insight is gained into the psychical side of things, some communications realized with intelligences outside our own, some light thrown upon a more than corporeal descent and destiny of man," wrote Frederick W. H. Myers in that monumental work entitled "Human Personality," which offers a rich mine of suggestion, "it would seem that the shells to be picked up on the shore of the ocean of truth will ever become scantier, and the agnostics of the future will gaze forth ever more hopelessly on that gloomy and unvoyageable sea. For vast as is the visible universe, infinite as may have been the intelligence that went to its evolution, yet[Pg 149] while viewed in the external way in which we alone can view it—while seen as a product and not as a plan—it cannot possibly suggest to us an indefinite number of universal laws. Such cosmic generalizations as gravitation, evolution, correlation of forces, conservation of energy, though assuredly as yet unexhausted, cannot, in the nature of things, be even approximately inexhaustible."

The entire trend of progress is toward the continued discovery of finer cosmic forces and their utilization in practical affairs. Within the past five years this tendency has strikingly demonstrated itself. The evolution of the ways and means of travel offers, in itself, an impressive illustration of this tendency. The visitor to the Musée Cluny in Paris will find, among the masses of relics of an historic pass, the state carriages used in the time of Louis XV. and Marie Antoinette. They are incredibly clumsy and gigantic,—the carriage itself mounted on four great wheels, two of which are very large, with the two front ones smaller,—the entire vehicle occupying about twice the space of a modern conveyance, and its weight[Pg 150] must be something to reckon with. Several of these are standing in the Cluny and offer a strange contrast with the carriages of to-day. But when these, with their lumbering motion, are contrasted,—not merely with the modern carriage, but with the flying automobile,—one realizes, indeed, the evolution in the methods of local transportation.

Again, let one compare the traditions of the sailing vessels on which passengers crossed to Europe within the memory of men still living,—the forty days' passage between Boston and Liverpool which is well within the memory of Doctor Hale,—with the passage on this latest floating palace of the ocean, the Kaiser Wilhelm II.,—and he realizes how far science has penetrated into the more subtle forces, where lightness and speed take the place of clumsy device and slow motion. To go up to the hurricane deck of the wonderful Kaiser Wilhelm and look down through the openings on the six mighty engines, with their intense throb of vibration day and night, is to behold an object lesson in the possibilities of motion. With the precision and the persistence of fate, the great beams fly up—and[Pg 151] down. The vibration pervades the entire vast spaces of the great steamer. It becomes like an electric current, a thing of life, to be missed when one leaves the steamer as if one had left there a part of his own life. There is an exhilaration in it that communicates itself to mind and body. It is like a dynamo generating vitality. And still more swift and subtle methods of loco-motion are in the air. Doctor Albertson, an electrical engineer of the Royal University of Denmark, has an invention for a railroad train without wheels to make a speed of three hundred miles an hour. "Two things defeated the attainment of speed above the present maximum (sixty miles an hour)," says a writer in the "New York Herald," and these are specified as "the dead weight of the train, and aerial resistance.

"Now comes the announcement that there has been discovered a method of abolishing the dead weight of the train, leaving only aerial resistance to be contended with. If this can be done, as Mr. Albertson asserts, half of the battle is won, and the world may yet be able to travel on the earth's surface with the much-dreamed-of speed[Pg 152] of hundreds of miles an hour. For many years the great principle of magnetism has been known to electricians and used in practical work by laymen. Steel companies have found the magnet useful in lifting huge metal girders. At one end of their lifting apparatuses they have placed a magnet which, when charged, grips the steel bars and lifts them, no matter how great their weight. It has been noticed that a magnet would move to come in contact with the steel bar as soon as it arrived within the drawing radius, carrying any amount of weight with it which happened to be attached at the time.

"It is this principle which Doctor Albertson sought to make use of—the lifting power of a magnet when attracted to a fixed rail of steel. He arranged a series of magnets under a miniature car running on a steel railway track. The magnets were insulated and attached to the bottom of the car so that they came under the rail and about an inch below it. Then he turned on enough electricity to make the magnets active. They rose upward toward the rail, lifting the car bodily in the air. The weight of the train was thus simply overcome!"[Pg 153]

The electro-magnetic train has demonstrated its principle to the satisfaction of scientific engineers. Professor Roberts, in charge of the chemical works at Niagara Falls, says of it:—

"It is the electrical discovery of the age, and so simple in application that the marvel is that it has escaped us so long. The lightening power of magnetism has been known for years, the greatest saving power to overcome gravity, but it seems it had to wait for Doctor Albertson to discover it."

The air-ship promises, however, to eclipse the greatest and swiftest of latter-day steamers. The air, rather than the ocean, is to be navigated.

All these marvellous developments in scientific activity correspond to the developments of man's mental and spiritual powers. Telepathy establishes its communication from spirit to spirit, as wireless telegraphy establishes its sending of messages without visible means. On both planes,—the physical and the psychical,—the subtle and finer forces are being utilized, and the horizon line of the unknown continually recedes before the progress of man.

Sir Oliver Lodge, LL.D., presented a new phase of the problem of personality in an address[Pg 154] in London, in the following statement of a speculative belief:—

"To tell the truth, I do not myself hold that the whole of any one of us is incarnated in these terrestrial bodies; certainly not in childhood; more, but perhaps not so very much more, in adult life. What is manifested in this body is, I venture to think likely, only a portion—an individualized, a definite portion—of a much larger whole. What the rest of me may be doing, for these few years while I am here, I do not know, perhaps it is asleep; but probably it is not so entirely asleep with men of genius; nor, perhaps, is it all completely inactive with the people called 'mediums.'

"Imagination in science is permissible, provided one's imaginations are not treated as fact, or even theory, but only as working hypotheses,—a kind of hypotheses which, properly treated, is essential to the progress of every scientific man. Let us imagine, then, as a working hypothesis, that our subliminal self—the other, the greater part of us—is in touch with another order of existence, and that it is occasionally able to communicate, or somehow, perhaps unconsciously, transmit to the fragment in the body something of the information accessible to it. This guess, if permissible, would contain a clue to a possible explanation of clairvoyance. We should then be like icebergs floating in an ocean, with only[Pg 155] a fraction exposed to sun and air and observation: the rest—by far the greater bulk—submerged and occasionally in subliminal contact, while still their peaks, their visible peaks, were far separate."

That which Doctor Lodge expresses in the form of a speculative theory is by many realized as an actual experience; an absolute consciousness that over and above and outside of the ordinary intelligent consciousness is another being more one's self than is his conscious self; with whom he is in a very varied degree of communion; clearer and more immediate at times; clouded, confused, even shut off by some dense state at others; intermittent always, yet often sufficiently clear and impressive to compel his attention to the phenomena and compel recognition of the truth. In fact, as one comes into still clearer recognition of this "other" self,—which is far more the true self than is the lower and lesser manifestation,—one comes to absolutely realize that his larger, higher, more comprehensive life is being lived in this higher realm, or condition, and that his entire being on the plane of the lower consciousness is a series of effects of which the causes lie in this other larger and more real[Pg 156] life. That is, the individual has two lives not precisely corresponding in chronological sequence. The experiences of the day are his because, before the day has dawned, they have been the experiences of the higher life lived in the larger realm. The spiritual self has realized that train of experiences in the spiritual realm; therefore, and as a result inevitable, these experiences precipitate themselves into the physical life, and are manifested on the physical plane of being. One does a given thing to-day, or meets a given event, because his spiritual or subliminal or even real self has already done that thing or met that event on the higher plane. The real being is all the time dwelling in the more real world. As all planes of life are spiritual planes,—even that which we call the physical, being but the cruder and denser quality of the spiritual,—it makes the theory clearer to designate the realm just above our present one as the ethereal. In this ethereal realm dwells the ethereal body. A certain portion of its consciousness animates the physical structure and works through the physical brain. It lies with ourselves as to how closely we may establish the relation between[Pg 157] the higher and the lower self. This relation may constantly be increased in the degree of receptivity of the lower to the higher self by living the life of the spirit. And what is the life of the spirit? The life of joy and peace; and the life of study, thought, and endeavor; the life of both intellectual and spiritual culture; the life in which the physical body is subordinated to its true place as a mechanism, an instrument for carrying out the will of the spiritual self.

Thus, by study, thought, and prayer, may one more and more consciously and entirely control and determine his active life, and constantly refine and exalt it in quality. As this is done its potency increases, for spirit alone is power.

"Telepathy itself, however, is in need of explanation. An idea or thought in the mind of one person reverberates, and dimly appears in the mind of another. How does this occur? Is it a physical process going on in some physical medium or ether connecting the two brains? Is it a primary physiological function of the brain, or is it primarily psychological? If psychological only, what does that[Pg 158] mean? Perhaps it may not be a direct immediate action between the two minds at all; perhaps a third intelligence is in communication with both."

The relations between the individual and the forces of the ethereal realm are also determining as regards health.

For health and illness are by no means the mere and exclusive consideration of the physical life. Health, in its complete significance, is mental and even moral, and involves, in its higher aspects, the entire question of the spiritual life. Health, successful achievement, and happiness are an indissoluble trinity, when interpreted in their full integrity and in their inter-relations. Ideally considered, they are in closest interpenetration. As a matter of actual fact each is often partially manifest,—good physical health without any special achievement; or a high degree of achievement with defective health; or both, without much resultant happiness; or happiness even, without outward success or physical health, resulting only from a deeper spiritual insight and recognition[Pg 159] of eternal laws. Still, ideally considered, as this world goes, health should be the basis of successful achievement, and this achievement should rest on health; and the union of both should produce the inflorescence of happiness; for the true sense of all successful achievement is in that it makes for the forces of righteousness, and a successful swindler or criminal could hardly be included under these general definitions. And so, to have good health, and to achieve good and noble work, must produce a good degree of personal happiness as inevitably as that certain numerical combinations produce certain numerical results. So much we may concede. The question is then before us: How can we secure and hold unvarying, from day to day, from year to year, this basis of physical health on which the superstructure of all endeavor and realization must rest? Just how shall one be well and keep well?

It is certainly a question not restricted to the physician nor yet to the metaphysician. For health is not merely a physical condition. It is the question of the poise, the harmony of the entire psychical being.[Pg 160]

"Investigations extending over many years have led me to a belief in the dual personality of man—that is, each human unit exists in two distinct states of superior consciousness. One of these states is called the primary or superliminal consciousness,—the personality by which a man is known to his objective associates, which takes cognizance through the senses of the outside world, and carries on the ordinary business of every-day life. The second or subliminal personality is the superior spiritual self, the man's own oversoul, which automatically superintends all physical functions and procedures, and influences mental and moral attitudes.

"It happens to be a fact of mind that in sleep—natural or induced—this subliminal or submerged self may be brought into active control of the objective life. My experiments have forced me to the conclusion that there is no difference as regards suggestibility between natural sleep and the so-called hypnotic trance. In the induced sleep the subject is in rapport exclusively with the operator; in natural sleep only with his own objective self, perhaps with a multitude of discarnate personalities, who think and feel in common with him, and, in case he be of[Pg 161] superior parts, possibly with all well-wishing extra-human intelligences."

Here we have the basis of truth. That condition of vigor, poise, vitality, and harmony which we call good health depends on the degree of control exercised over the physical body by that "second or subliminal personality, the superior spiritual self, the man's own oversoul, which," as Doctor Quackenbos so truly observes, "superintends all physical functions and procedures, and influences mental and moral attitudes."

The problem, then, becomes that of bringing the psychical body into this receptive relation to the physical self? How shall the perfect spiritual supremacy be established? This question reveals, of itself, to how great a degree health is a mental and moral as well as a physical affair.

Perhaps the initial step is that of clearly realizing—of holding the luminous conception—of one's self as a spiritual being in the psychical body, temporarily inhabiting a physical body,—a spiritual being using as its instrument a physical body so long as it is at work in the phys[Pg 162]ical world, or on the physical plane. One may thus conceive of his physical body as being really as objective as is the pen of the writer; the palette and brushes of the painter; the machine, or mechanism, or instrument used by any one. And the moment one learns to thus hold the physical instrument objectively, he thus brings it under the control of thought. He is no longer so a part of it; so entangled and involved in it that he cannot control it. The moment he holds this clear, vivid mental realization of it as his instrument, he is in command. This may be illustrated by an electric car and a motor-man. If the man were bound up and entangled among the cogs and wheels he could not guide and control the car; but in his place, free from all its mechanism, his hand on the motor, the course and the degree of speed obeys his mental direction applied through his control.

This realization of the true relation of the spiritual man to his body is the initial condition of health, and this involves as a matter of course the spiritual relations with the Divine Power, and receptivity to the infinite energy.

It also involves an intelligent care of the[Pg 163] physical mechanism. A clogged pen would repress the recording of the noblest sonnet or epic; a defective brush, or pigment, would ruin the picture of the greatest artist; a broken wire would prevent the transmission of the most important telegraphic or cable message. And so, however intelligently and completely one holds the faith of supremacy of the spiritual over the physical, he must realize the absolute necessity of fidelity to hygienic laws. Food, in its quantity and quality; bathing, exercise, fresh air, sleep,—these are the conditions on which the state of the physical mechanism depends, and which involve that perfection of health which determines exhilaration, power, achievement, and happiness.

Canon Scott Holland of St. Paul's Cathedral has ably discussed these new problems of the finer forces in the ethereal realm; and in a discourse entitled "Other World Activities" he drew the following analogy:—

"The text is from the Book of Daniel, a Book which takes us into a world of visions and trances and mystical imagery. There is a world within the world; a life beyond life. That world is not only[Pg 164] the sphere of God, but of recognizable beings, meditating presences subject to rule, with organization and degrees, activities and authorities. It is a host, a kingdom, swayed by law and purpose. In the Bible there is much of this, learnt probably by the Hebrews from their captors. They had gone far afield: their horizon had been widened: they had been taught how to enter largely into this mysterious region. But, fortunately, they dealt soberly with this weltering flood of occult knowledge. These hosts of unseen presences are marshalled into order: they are not mere genii, fantastic and magical; they pass under the control of the sole directive will of the Most High. They are solemn instruments of spiritual destiny: they are semi-human, and the record is, 'one like unto a man touched me.'"

Canon Holland proceeds to arraign modern teachings. "We have drifted from this tremendous reality," he says. "We have tried to isolate the field of known experience, and to cut it off from disturbing supernatural imaginings. We have set ourselves to purge out from our scheme of things anything that seemed to interfere with it. The unseen was the unknown and the unknowable. But our agnostic programme[Pg 165] has broken down. Facts have been too much for it. The isolation desired by it is impossible. In and out of the life that we can cover with our rationalized experiences, there are influences, forces, powers which are forever at work, and belong to a world beyond our scientific methods. We float in a mysterious ether to which no physical limitations apply. Sounds, motions, transmit themselves through this medium, under conditions which transform our whole idea of what space or time they mean. Through and beyond the semi-physical mystery, a world of spiritual activity opens upon us. It has capacities of which we have never dreamed. It allows of apparent contact of spirit with spirit, in spite of material distance and physical obstruction. There are modes of communication which are utterly unintelligible to our ordinary scientific assumptions, yet which actual experience tends more and more to verify."

Yes, as Canon Holland well says, "Facts have been too much" for those who would cling to the old and the less intelligent ideas of the future life. The ethereal world will even cease to be mysterious before advancing scientific in[Pg 166]vestigation and knowledge. Through the ether, as Canon Holland notes, sounds and motions transmit themselves "under conditions which transform our whole idea of what space or time may mean." In the realm of present life the same assertion may be made. Who can contemplate wireless telegraphy without having opened to him a range of activities and conditions undreamed of heretofore? "We become sure," continues Canon Holland, "that both above and below our normal consciousness we are in touch with mysteries that travel far, and that we lie open to spiritual acts done unto us from a far distance, that we assimilate intimations and intuitions that reach us by inexplicable channels.

"This world of spirit powers and activities has been opened afresh; and now even physical science is compelled to recognize the evidence for it, and a new psychological language is coming into being to describe its phenomena. We are only slowly recovering our hold upon this life of mystic intuition, of exalted spiritual communications; we are only beginning to recognize the abnormal and exceptional spiritual condition with which Saint Paul was familiar, when, whether in[Pg 167] the body or out of it, he could not say,—God only knows,—he was transported to the third Heaven and heard unutterable things."

This remarkable sermon is an initiation of a new era of religious teaching. The light is breaking and the full illumination is only a question of time.

Life is exalted in its purpose and refined in its quality by holding the perpetual consciousness of the two worlds in which we dwell; by the constant realization that

This atmosphere is all peopled, and it is magnetic with intelligence. Every spirit-call for aid, for guidance, for support, is answered. If a man fall on a crowded street in the city, how instantaneous is the aid that cares for him. He is lifted and conveyed tenderly to his home, or to a hospital, or to some temporary resting-place if the ill be but a slight one. Strangers or friends, it matters not, rush to his rescue. This, which occurs in the tangible and visible world, is but a feeble illustration of the more profound tender[Pg 168]ness, the clearer understanding, the more potent aid that is given instantly to man from the unseen helpers and friends in this spirit world which floats like an atmosphere around this world of sense. It is all and equally the help of God; it is the Divine answer to the call; but the Heavenly Father works through ways and means. If a man fall on the street God does not cause a miracle to be wrought and a bed to descend from the clouds, but He works through the sympathies of the bystanders. Is it not equally conceivable that the appeal for leading and for light sent into spirit spheres meets the response of spirit-aid; that it awakens the interest and the infinite tenderness and care of those who have passed from this life into that of the next stage beyond, and that they are, according to their development and powers, co-workers with God, even as we who are yet on earth aim and pray to be?

Now it is just this faith that is so largely pervading the religious world to-day. Spirituality includes all the convictions that constitute ethics. Spirituality is the unchanging quality in all forms of organized religion. And it is[Pg 169] found, in greater or in less degree, in every sect and every creed. Outward forms come and go; they multiply, or they decrease, and the change in the expression of religious faith is a matter largely determined by the trend of general progress; but the essentials of religion, under all organized forms, remain the same, for the essential element is spirituality. In and around Copley Square in Boston, within the radius of one block, are several denominations whose order of worship varies, the one from another. The Baptist believes in immersion as the outer sign of the inner newness of life; the Episcopalian holds dear his ritual; the Unitarian and the Presbyterian, and perhaps a half-dozen other sects in close proximity (which express the various forms of what they call "new thought"), each and all exist and have their being by virtue of the one essential faith held in common by all,—the one aim to which all are tending,—that of the spiritualization of life. The larger recognition of the spiritual universe includes the recognition of this interpenetration of the life in the Seen and the Unseen. Every thought and decision is like an[Pg 170] action on the spiritual side. A thought has the force of a deed, and there is a literal truth in the line,—

"Ah! let us hope that to our praise
Good God not only reckons
The moments when we tread His ways,
But when the spirit beckons."

The thought-life is, indeed, the most real of the two lives, and dominates the other. The events and achievements, held in thought and will, precipitate themselves into outer circumstance and action.

To live in this perfect sympathy of companionship with the forces and the powers of the unseen world is to dwell amid perpetual reinforcement of energy, solace, and sustaining aid, and with faith vitalized by spiritual perception.

All scientific problems are ethical, and even spiritual, problems. They are discoveries in the divine laws. "Can man by searching find out God?" Apparently he approaches constantly to this possibility, and finds that[Pg 171]

"—through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns."

Every succeeding century brings humanity to a somewhat clearer perception of the nature of the Divine Creation. However slowly, yet none the less surely, does the comprehension of man and his place in the universe and his oneness with the Divine life increase with every century. Jonathan Edwards taught that while Nature might reflect the Divine image, man could not, as he was in a "fallen" state, until he was regenerated. Putting aside the mere dogma involved in the "fall" of man, the other matter—that of regeneration, of redemption—is undeniable, even though we may interpret this process in a different manner from that of the great eighteenth-century theologian. The redemption, the regeneration of man, lies in faith. In that is the substance through which and by means of which man comes into conscious communion with God. It is by the intense activity possible to this mental attitude that he conquers the problems of the universe, that he advances in knowledge, and advances in the increasing capacity to[Pg 172] receive the Divine messages and to follow the Divine leadings.

Of late years a new force has been discovered in the line of ethico-spiritual aid in the higher order of hypnotism, as discovered and practiced by Doctor Quackenbos, who may, indeed, without exaggeration, be called the discoverer of this higher phase of applied suggestion. "I have been brought," he says, "into closest touch with the human soul. First objectively; subsequently in the realm of subliminal life, where, practically liberated in the hypnotic slumber from its entanglement with a perishable body, it has been open to approach by the objective mind in which it elected to confide, dynamically absorptive of creative stimulation by that mind, and lavish in dispensing to the personality in rapport the suddenly apprehended riches of its own higher spiritual nature."

Of the nature of this power, we again find Doctor Quackenbos saying: "Hypnotic suggestion is a summoning into ascendancy of the true man; an accentuation of insight into life and[Pg 173] its procedures; a revealing, in all its beauty and strength and significance, of absolute, universal, and necessary truth; and a portraiture of happiness as the assured outcome of living in consonance with this truth." The learned doctor regards hypnotism, indeed, as "a transfusion of personality."

The truth is that there lies in every nature forces which, if recognized and developed, would lift one to higher planes and induce in him such an accession of activities and energies as to fairly transform his entire being and achievement. This would be effected, too, on an absolutely normal plane. The development of the spiritual faculties is just as normal as is that of the intellectual. And it is to this development that we must look for the true communion with those who have passed into the Unseen. The objective life must be spiritualized. The soul can come into a deeper realization of its own dignity and the worth of its higher nature; can discern the spiritual efficiency, the energy commensurate to every draft upon it.

All, however, that is done by the highest phase of hypnotism, as exerted by Doctor Quacken[Pg 174]bos, can be done by auto-suggestion. The soul has only to call upon its own higher forces. It has only to act from love and compassion,—from sympathy and generous aims, and all the infinite power of the Divine world is at its service.

"We had letters to send; couriers could not go fast enough, not far enough; broke their wagons, foundered their horses; bad roads in spring, snowdrifts in winter, heats in summer; could not get the horses out of a walk.

"But we found out that the air and earth were full of Electricity, and always going our way—just the way we wanted to send. Would he take a message? Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do; would carry it in no time. Only one doubt occurred one staggering objection—he had no carpet bag, no visible pockets, no hands, not so much as a mouth, to carry a letter. But, after much thought and many experiments, we managed to meet the conditions, and to fold up the letter in such invisible, compact form as he could carry in those invisible pockets of his, never wrought by needle and thread—and it went like a charm.[Pg 175]

"Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chores done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day, and cost us nothing."

With his wonderful insight into conditions, Emerson thus expresses a provision of conditions that are now being realized to an even greater degree than he consciously knew, although he unconsciously foretold them. Now it is wireless telegraphy that is the ultimate fulfilment of what he saw,—the method that will reduce to practical realization his counsel to hitch one's wagon to a star, and "see his chores done by the gods themselves."

It is not only humanity—civilization—the onward sweep and march by the progress of the world, but the individual life also that can take advantage of "the might of the elements." The one irresistible element is the power of will, the power that results from the perfect uniting of the human will with the divine will. People talk of fate, and conditions, and burdens, and limitations. They are all merely negative, and[Pg 176] are easily and instantly subject to the infinite and irresistible potency of the will brought to bear upon them.

On the threshold of any endeavor when one takes account of his possessions and conditions,—material and immaterial; when he again, from a new vantage ground, surveys his future, it is his salvation and success to realize the depth and height of his own personal power over his own life.

"There are points from which we may command our life,
When the soul sweeps the future like a glass,
And coming things, full freighted with our fate,
Jut out on the dark offing of the mind."

But when these points appear they must be taken advantage of at the moment. They are the result of an occultation of events that may never occur again within the limits of a lifetime. The swift intuition that leaps over all conceivable processes is the heaven-appointed monitor. It is the divine voice speaking. It is the word which must be obeyed. When one

We need a new, a deeper, a far more practical realization that the ideals and visions which flash before us are the real mechanism of life; that they are the working model by which one is to pattern his experience, in outward selection and in grouping by means of his own force of will. Somewhere has Emerson said,—

which is, to the potential circumstances, like a magnet introduced among filings that suddenly attracts to itself and draws all into related and orderly groups. Circumstances are thus amenable to the power of will brought to bear that selects, arranges, combines, after the pattern of the revealed ideal held in view.

Each individual life may "borrow the might of the elements." Man is created, not only in the image of God, but with God-like faculties and potency, which, if he but truly relate them to the divine potency, if he unite his will with God's will, there is then no limit, no bound to that which he may achieve.

In one of the most wonderful creations of Vedder, the artist shows us the figure of a[Pg 178] woman whose eyes are closed, and whose hands, lying in her lap, are inextricably entangled amid crewels and threads that bind and hold them. But one sees, also, that she has but to open her eyes, and lift her hands, and all the entanglement would fall off of itself. The picture offers the most typical lesson of life. All imprisonment of conditions is dissolved into thin air the instant one impresses his own will-power on the affairs and circumstances of his life. He can do that which he desires to do. The desire has only to be intensified into conscious, intelligent choice, into absolute will,—and all the minor barriers melt away and are no more. Every life may hitch its wagon to a star. It may borrow the might of the elements. It has but to resolve to hold its ideal firmly and clearly in mind, and it will then be realized as the sculptor's dream in clay is realized in the marble. "All things are yours," said Saint Paul. One has but to take his own; to wisely and clearly select the elements and combine them by that irresistible potency of mental magnetism and energy.[Pg 179]

THE POWER OF THE EXALTED MOMENT.

"The salvation of Christ is the complete occupation of the human life by the divine life."

It is in our best moments, not in our worst moments, that we are most truly ourselves. Oh believe in your noblest impulses, in your purest instincts, in your most unworldly and spiritual thoughts! You see man most truly when he seems to you to be made for the best things. You see your true self when you believe that the best and purest and devoutest moment which ever came to you is only the suggestion of what you were meant to be and might be all the time. Believe that, O children of God! This is the way in which a soul lives forever in the light which first began to burn around it when it was with Jesus in the Holy Mount.—Phillips Brooks.

The power of the exalted moment is the very motor of human life. The exalted moment is the dynamo that generates the working energy. The moment itself fades; it passes into the region of memory where its true service is to shine, with the unfailing continuance of radium, as a perpetual illumination of life. It is the greatest, the saddest, the most hopelessly fatal error that can be made,—to cast away from one the exalted moment because it has not fulfilled itself in outer condition and circumstance. Vision and prophecy are given by God for a working model, which the long patient days—days of monotony, of trial, of commonplace work under commonplace conditions, amid commonplace people and events—are yet to fashion and fulfil. These are the material,—the ordinary events, the[Pg 182] commonplace daily duty. The perplexity of problems rather than the clear grasping of their significance; the misunderstanding and the misconstruction of motive that make the tragedy of life; the interpretation of evil where one only meant all that was true, and sympathetic, and appreciative, and holy; the torture and trial, where should be only sweetness of spirit and true recognition,—of all these are the days made; all these are a part of "the flowing conditions of life," which it is the business, the responsibility, the personal duty, to transmute into noble living, into poetry and ecstasy and exaltation, and into that perfect faith in God that can truly say, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Though He slay all that made life seem worth the living; the enchantment, the response of sympathy; recognition rather than misconstruction,—though all these be obscured in what may seem a total eclipse,—still let one not forget "The Gleam;" still let one keep faith with the power of the exalted moment. It came from God and held its deep significance. It laid upon its beholder consecration of divinest aspiration and unfaltering effort.[Pg 183] "If I could uncover the hearts of you who are listening to me this morning," said Phillips Brooks, in a memorable sermon, "I should find in almost all—perhaps in all—of them a sacred chamber where burns the bright memory of some loftiest moment, some supreme experience, which is your transfiguration time. Once on a certain morning you felt the glory of living, and the misery of life has never since that been able quite to take possession of your soul. Once for a few days you knew the delight of a perfect friendship. Once you saw for an inspired instant the idea of your profession blaze out of the midst of its dull drudgery. Once, just for a glorious moment, you saw the very truth, and believed it, without the shadow of a cloud. And so the question comes,—What do they mean? What value shall I give to those transformation experiences?"

On the personal answer to that question depends all the success or the failure; all the nobleness or the unworthiness of the individual life. No one can estimate too ardently, or too earnestly, the spiritual salvation of keeping faith with the exalted moment,[Pg 184]—

"Delayed, it may be, for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse—not a few,
With much to learn and much to forget"—

ere the golden hour of fulfilment shall come; but faith in the exalted moment is but another name for faith in God.

The great truth of life—that which we may well hold as its central and controlling and dominating truth—is that "our best moments are not departures from ourselves, but are really the only moments in which we have truly been ourselves." These moments flash upon the horizon of the soul and vanish; they image themselves before us as in vision, and fade; but the fact of their appearance is its own proof of their deep reality. They are the substance compared with which all the lower and lesser experiences are mere phantasmagoria.

And this fulfilment is not found, but made. It is a spiritual achievement. So let one not reject, or ignore, or be despairing before undreamed-of, unexplained, and incomprehensible forms of trial, but know that it is trial that worketh patience; know that "no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but griev[Pg 185]ous; nevertheless, afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby."

"It was given unto me," wrote Dante in the Vita Nuova, "to behold a very wonderful vision; wherein I saw things that determined me."

It may be given to any one at any time to behold the vision. Circumstances are fluidic and impressionable, and take on any form that the mental power has achieved sufficient strength to stamp, and because of this—which is the explanation of the outward phenomena whose significance, on the spiritual side, is all condensed in prayer—one need never despond or despair. At any instant he can so unite his own will with the divine will that new combinations of event and circumstance will appear in his life. A writer on this line of thought has recently said:—

"There is an elemental essence—a strange living essence—which surrounds us on every side, and which is singularly susceptible to the influence of human thought.

"This essence responds with the most wonderful delicacy to the faintest action of our minds or desires,[Pg 186] and this being so, it is interesting to note how it is affected when the human mind formulates a definite, purposeful thought or wish."

There is a phase of occult thought represented at its best by Mr. C. W. Leadbeater of London, and at its worst by a host of miscellaneous writers, whose speculations are more or less grotesque and devoid of every claim to attention, who materialize thought and purpose, and invest it with an organism which they name "an elemental," and one finds Mr. Leadbeater saying things like this, of the results of an intensely held thought:—

"The effect produced is of the most striking nature. The thought seizes upon the plastic essence, and moulds it instantly into a living being of appropriate form,—a being which when once thus created is in no way under the control of its creator, but lives out a life of its own, the length of which is proportionate to the intensity of the thought or wish which called it into existence. It lasts, in fact, just as long as the thought force holds it together."

"Still more pregnant of results for good or evil are a man's thought about other people, for in that[Pg 187] case they hover not about the thinker, but about the object of the thought. A kindly thought about any person or any earnest wish for his good will form and project toward him a friendly artificial elemental; if the wish be a definite one, as, for example, that he may recover from some sickness, then the elemental will be a force ever hovering over him to promote his recovery, or to ward off any influence that might tend to hinder it, and in doing this it will display what appears like a very considerable amount of intelligence and adaptability, though really it is simply a force acting along the line of the least resistance—pressing steadily in one direction all the time, and taking advantage of any channel that it can find, just as the water in a cistern would in a moment find the one open pipe among a dozen closed ones, and proceed to empty itself through that."

This train of speculation, which if one is to reject he must first confront, is demoralizing. It leads nowhere save into mental quagmires and quicksands. It leads into materiality and not into spirituality. Of course with all this the one question is as to whether such conceptions are true; but judged by intuition, which is the Roentgen-ray of spirit—judged by the data reached by scholars and thinkers, by psycholo[Pg 188]gists and scientists—it has no claim to recognition. That thought is the most intense form of energy, its potency far exceeding that of even electricity, is certainly true, and that one can think himself—or another person—into new and different outward phases and circumstances is most true.

Tesla, in a paper discussing the problem of how to increase the sum of human energy, considers the possibility of the existence of organized beings under conditions impossible for us. "We cannot even positively assert that some are not present in this, our world, in the very midst of us," he says, "for their constitution and life manifestation may be such that we are unable to perceive them."

This speculative possibility opens the gate to the scientific recognition of the truth that "all the company of heaven" may companion us, here and now, in the terrestrial life, invisible, intangible, inaudible to the perceptions of sense. It may largely be through their ministry and mediation that the unforeseen and unexpected opportunities, privileges, gifts fall upon man,—gifts that the gods provide.[Pg 189]

Dreams, visions, and ideals are given that they may be realized. The vision is projected from the higher spiritual realm as the working model, the pattern of the life here. A dream is something to be carried out; not put aside and neglected and lost in over-lying and ever-accumulating stratas of experience. The dream, once clearly recognized, becomes a personal responsibility. It has been revealed for a purpose. It is the Divine revelation to the individual life, and these visions are given to the individual as well as to humanity, and they are the most significant occurrences in the entire experience of life. To once clearly recognize this divine ideal, this glorious vision of possibilities that shines once and for all upon the individual, and then to turn away from it and leave it unrealized in the outward life: to put it by, because the effort to transform the vision into external and visible conditions is surrounded with difficulties and invested with perplexities, is to wander into the maze of confusion. Difficulties are merely incidental. They are neither here nor there. If God give the dream He will lead the way. If He gives it, He means something by it, and its[Pg 190] significance should be appreciated and taken into life as a working energy. It is the will of the Lord, and to pray sincerely that the Divine will be done, is also to accept the obligation of entering into the doing of it. Indeed, difficulties and perplexities in the way do not count and should not. Briars and brambles there will always be, but one's path lies onward all the same. Who would relinquish a right purpose because its achievement were hard? All the more should he press on and gain the strength of the obstacles that he overcomes.

Doctor William T. Harris says, "Realize your ideals quickly." That is, an ideal is a responsibility; it is the working model that God has set before the individual; the pattern after which and by which he shall shape his life. If he accept and follow it with fidelity and energy; with that energy born of absolute faith in the Divine leading,—he will find himself miraculously led; he will find that the obstacle which appears so insurmountable in perspective vanishes as he comes near; that a way is made, a path appears.

It chanced to the writer of these papers to[Pg 191] take a long day's stage drive one summer through the Colorado mountain region. For a distance of forty-five miles the solitary road wound on and on, ever ascending through the dreamy, purple mountains. The entire route was a series of vistas that apparently came to an abrupt end at the base of an insurmountable height. The mountain wall seemed to utterly arrest progress, as it rose across the ascending valley through which the driver urged his "four-in-hand," and no way to pass beyond the next mountain ahead could possibly be discerned. But as the stage drew near, a way, unseen before, revealed itself, and the winding road found its outlet and onward course in another valley opening by a natural pass between the hills, and one that apparently in its turn was as inevitably blocked at its end by another mountain range. It was a constant interest to watch the changing landscape and discover the new ways that constantly came in sight as fast as the need for them came. That day amid the dreamy purple of the Colorado mountains was one to translate itself into renewed trust in the Divine guidance on the journey of life. Some wonderful words of[Pg 192] Phillips Brooks seemed to write themselves on the air:—

"Look up, poor soul, out of the valley and know that on the top of yonder shining mountain lies folded safe the secret of your life, the oracle which would, if you could read it, solve all your mysteries and tell you just exactly how you ought to live. Look up out of the valley and know that it is there; and then turn back again into the valley, for in the valley is the home where you must live, and you can never read the oracle which you know is there upon the mountain top."

That day, alone with the mountains and with God, was one to leave its impress forever upon life. It was a day of solutions as well as of impressions—of solutions of the problem of living. One has but to follow the path that God has revealed to him, and however insurmountable the difficulties that seem to hedge him in and to limit his progress, they vanish as they are drawn near, and a way is revealed.

To forsake a dream as being impracticable and impossible of realization is to take the wrong turning in life, like one who leaves the mountain road,—which winds in and[Pg 193] out of the passes, on and on, and leads to a definite place at last,—and, because he sees an apparently impassable mountain wall across the path, forsakes this and wanders off into some other valley and defile that looks more open, but in whose mazes he loses himself and makes no progress toward his true destination.

No,—when the vision shines suddenly upon one's life, it is God's call to him to realize in it outward expression. The difficulties that hedge it round about will vanish as he approaches them. A dream is given to be realized. It is the working model that God sends into one's life for that full expression which alone is at once his best service and truest success. It is the common daily work of fulfilling duties add meeting claims. "Not by the exceptional," says Maeterlinck, "shall the last word ever be spoken; and, indeed, what we call the sublime should be only a clearer, profounder insight into all that is perfectly normal." It is of service, often, to watch those on the peaks who do battle; but it is well, too, not to forget those in the valley below who fight not at all. As we see all that happens to these whose life knows no struggle; as we realize how much[Pg 194] must be conquered in us before we can rightly distinguish their narrower joys from the joy known to them who are striving on high, then, perhaps does the struggle itself appear to become less important; but, for all that, we love it the more. This normal fulfilment of the due claims of ordinary life leads to that order of success which is a beautiful and desirable one, and which is almost a universal aim and purpose. Aspirations and energy are its factors, and these are of all various and varying degrees of excellence according to the specific aim in view. Success itself, therefore, is merely a representative term, and may be used regarding almost every variety of achievement, from the triumphant winning of a game of football, the making of a great fortune, the attainment of professional or political rank, the production of great art, the acquirement of world-wide fame, or the achievement of character that is potent for fine and ennobling influence. All these are typical of myriad forms of the thing the world calls success, and while it involves a vast amount of competition, of selfishness, of greed, of injustice, it is yet a matter of the progress of humanity that each[Pg 195] individual should strive after the highest form of attainment that he is capable of conceiving. In the long run, and as a general principle, this is advantageous and desirable. It involves and indeed develops many of the lower and baser qualities; but these are the tares among the wheat, and the wheat is essential. The great enterprise that builds a railway across the continent, tunneling under mountains, or climbing the precipitous inclines; that inaugurates a new steamer line, or that exerts itself for the founding of institutions for culture or technical instruction; that concerns itself with municipal reforms and improvements,—all these expressions of energy are manifestations of successful effort, and are necessary to the onward march of civilization. Yet the visible achievement is not, after all, the realization of the highest ideal of success.

The conditions of success may best be approached by a clearly defined idea of what success itself means, what it stands for to us, what proportion of our real life it represents. Success is the watchword of American life—one might almost, indeed, say that it is made the test of our national life to a far greater degree than in any[Pg 196] other country. The elements are well defined in Emerson's phrase of "the flowing conditions of life." They are, indeed, more than merely plastic and malleable; they are fluid, flowing, and the constant advance into higher states of life is precisely in proportion to the mental and moral force of the individual brought to bear upon them. Even this assertion, however, is to hold in the light of the true conception of success itself. We see a man whose life is conspicuously that of mental and moral force, working faithfully and ably day by day, year by year, and yet never being free from certain financial anxieties, if not financial needs; while his neighbor, who is neither very learned nor able, nor yet in any wise remarkable in his moral development, is living much after the fashion of Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold. But is gold the test of success?

The panorama of life is a complicated one. It used to be the fashion of the novelists to represent the world of riches and fashion as the world devoid of sympathy and love, and often, indeed, as devoid even of moral principle; while the world of poverty and toil was held up as[Pg 197] composed of men and women whose lives were all unselfishness and sacrifice, and as those who truly followed the example of Him who was meek and lowly of heart. But the panorama of actual life reveals no such sharply defined divisions as that. Virtue and vice are not checked off into special and separate regions; wealth has its greatness of mind and beneficence of sympathy and love, and poverty has its selfishness and cruelty and injustice. Other things being equal, the command of unlimited means may be so used as to make it one of the great blessings of life, and this fact is attended and illustrated by such an increasing array of evidence as to make the statement merely the trite one of every-day fact. Again, that prominence in affairs that we call position is good if rightly used, and to an increasing degree it is so used. Noblesse oblige is the watchword of modern life.

That line from a poem of Emerson's most clearly defines true success. The "power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life and man[Pg 198]ners,"—to achieve such power as is thus enumerated by Matthew Arnold, and adding to it that which is greater than all, and that without which all else is useless and unvitalized, the power of the Divine energy received through prayer,—these are the powers and achievements that tend to the true and only success,—the success of character.

New conceptions of the old watchwords of life are in the air. In "Culture" President Eliot of Harvard sees new points of view; he finds a new definition of the cultivated man, who is not, in this Twentieth-Century reading of the term, to be "a weak, critical, fastidious creature, vain of a little exclusive information or of an uncommon knack in Latin verse or mathematical logic; he is to be a man of quick perceptions, broad sympathies, and wide affinities, responsive but independent, self-reliant but deferential, loving truth and candor, but also moderation and proportion, courageous but gentle, not finished but perfecting."

"The situation that has not its ideal was never yet occupied by man," well said Goethe; and perhaps one of the greatest aids to both[Pg 199] achievement and happiness would be to recognize this ideal as the standard placed before one, the model after which he is to fashion his life, because he is, now and here, in the Divine Presence, because now and here he "stands before God." Nor is this too sublime a test for the trivialities of every day. As a matter of truth, nothing is trivial that has to do with the life of the spirit. The petty irritations, impatience, vexations, and disappointments of life are things that affect one's spiritual quality, that make or mar his higher self, that accelerate or retard his progress in the upward way, according as these feelings are allowed to take control or are resolutely conquered. The occurrences that excite them are, to the life of the spirit, like the "gifts" in a kindergarten,—they are the object lessons by means of which growth and progress are attained. Now, if one can conceive of his life, every day, every hour, as lived in the very presence of the Divine; if he can realize himself at all times as "standing before God," how this recognition transforms all the conditions and circumstances! The drama of living is instantly lifted up to a higher plane. That which was[Pg 200] hard becomes easy; that which was sad, or dull, or unattractive, becomes invested with interest. One is living, not unto himself, but unto God. He is living within that marvellous, all-enfolding charm and radiance. He is an actor in the great spiritual drama, and he feels the stimulus of playing his part nobly and well.

And they who have gone behind the curtain come forth and minister to him. He is aware of the courage of companionship.

"'Mortal,' they softly say,
'Peace to thy heart.
We, too, yes, mortal,
Have been as thou art.'"

Voices unheard by the outer ear speak to the soul; presences unseen by the eye are yet felt, giving their sympathy and stimulus.

It is good to remember that it is not only after death that the soul stands before God; that here and now is the heavenly test to which life must be held amenable; here and now must one make his thought and his acts those that know only the ideals of love and generosity and sweetness and courage. One may thus call up all his higher forces to meet misunderstandings with[Pg 201] patience and with love: to meet adverse fortune with courage and with stronger and more intense endeavor; to live above the tide of jar or fret so as to dwell in perpetual radiance and sunshine of spirit. This is to "stand before God" here and now, through the days and the experiences of the life that is, as well as to anticipate standing before His Presence in that which is to come.

Visions and enthusiasms are the only true guides in life. To keep true to the ideal dream that in some rare and exalted moment falls upon the soul, is to set one's steps toward that success which lies in fulfilment. Such dreams may be obscured by passing clouds; they may become entangled with the transient and the trivial; but nothing that is temporary holds over them any power to disintegrate or to destroy, for they are made of heavenly revealings and illuminations.

The ideal that reveals itself in a sudden vision of the higher harmonies and achievements possible to human life is but another name for the Opportunity which Shakespeare defines,—the[Pg 202] opportunity that, if one fail to accept it, vanishes, to leave all the remainder of life "bound in shallows and in miseries."

There is something about hesitation and reconsiderations that is curiously fatal to successful achievement. Good fortune is in going on,—not in going back. The parable of Lot's wife, who turned into a pillar of salt because she looked back, is by no means inapplicable to the life of to-day. Let one on whom the vision has shone look backward instead of forward and he becomes paralyzed and immovable. He has invoked inimical influences. He is impeded by the shallows and the miseries. He has withdrawn himself from all the heavenly forces that lead him on. The fidelity to the vision is the vital motor. It gives that exhilaration of energy which makes possible the impossible.

"The Americans have many virtues," said Emerson, "but they have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of. We use these words as if they were as obsolete as Selah. And yet they have the broadest meaning and the most cogent application. The opening of the spiritual senses,"[Pg 203] continues Emerson, "disposes men even to greater sacrifices, to leave their signal talents, their means and skill of procuring a present success, their power and their fame,—to cast all things behind in the insatiable thirst for divine communications. A purer fame, a greater power, rewards the sacrifice."

Each recurring New Year is an open door. However arbitrary are the divisions of Time, there is inspiration and exaltation in standing on the threshold of an untried year, with its fresh pages awaiting record. It is, again, the era of possibilities. The imaginative faculty of the soul must, indeed, be "fed with objects immense and eternal." Life stretches before one in its diviner unity,—even in the wholeness of the life that is and that which is to come. There is not one set of motives and purposes to be applied to this life, and another set to that which awaits us. This is the spiritual world, here and now, and it is the business of man to live divinely in it; to be responsive to the enthusiasms that enchant his thought; to be faithful to the vision that beckons him on. It is well to drop the old that one may seize the new.[Pg 204] Progress lies in a successive series of new conditions. Let one give all and ask for nothing,—let him yield himself wholly to the overpowering enthusiasm; let him not look backward from his vision of the Morning Star and the Promised Land, and thus shall the New Year fulfil itself in ever widening glory and that enchanting loveliness which invests the higher fulfilments of life.

"To work, to help and to be helped, to learn sympathy through suffering, to learn faith by perplexity, to reach truth through wonder,—behold! this is what it is to prosper, this is what it is to live," said Phillips Brooks. When Herbert Spencer produced his great "Data of Ethics" he did not consider in it the ethics of interruptions which sometimes assume a formidable place in the strenuous life. One is perhaps exceptionally patient and tolerant when it is a question of great trial or calamity, and not infrequently very impatient with the trifling annoyances and demands and interruptions that occur. Yet, is there not just here a richness of opportunity in[Pg 205] the aim to "do good to all men" that may often be unrecognized? A writer who may be pressed for time finds in his mail-matter a number of personal requests from strangers. One package contains manuscripts, perhaps, which a woman in Montana entreats shall be read and returned with advice or suggestion. Some one in Texas wants a paragraph copied that he may use it in compiling a calendar. An individual in Indiana has a collection of autographs for sale and begs to know of the ways and means for disposing of them. And an author in Arizona desires that a possible publisher be secured for her novel; and so the requests run on. Strictly speaking, perhaps, no one of these has any real right to thus tax the time and energy of a stranger; but is there not another side to it? Here are an array of interruptions, but why not give them another name—that of opportunities? One has, perhaps, his theories and his convictions regarding the service of humanity. He holds it to be a duty,—a privilege. He believes that it is through entering into this service that he may even co-operate with God in the onward progress. To "help humanity" is a very attractive and high-[Pg 206]sounding term. But what is humanity? Is it not, after all, composed of individuals? And here are individuals to be helped; here they are, with their several individual requests, and the injunction of the apostle suggests itself, "As ye have therefore opportunity, ... do good unto all men." Do not the interruptions assume a new form, and are they not, thereby, transfigured into glad and golden opportunity?

And it is the will of God,—that great, resistless, and unceasing force, working underneath all our human wills—it is the will of God manifesting itself in small things as well as in those that seem outwardly more important, that has grouped all these special things together and sent them on an especially busy morning. Shall not one rejoice and recognize that the need of another is brought as a privilege to himself? The blessedness of giving is not limited to cheques and bank-bills. There are gifts that far transcend these,—gifts of patience, sympathy, thought, and counsel, and (such is the blessedness of the Divine Law) these are gifts that the poorest can give. The need on the one side may be the luxury on the other, for it[Pg 207] invites sympathetic comprehension and the enlargement of friendly relations. And as for one's time,—even in a full and busy life,—it is not so much time that one requires as it is right conditions. An hour will do the work of a day, when the conditions are harmonious; and nothing so increases the degree of spiritual energy as the glow and ardor and joy of doing some little service for another. In this lies the real blessedness, the real luxury of life, and one reads the profound significance in the words of Maeterlinck: "It is well to believe that there needs but a little more courage, more love, more devotion to life, a little more eagerness, one day to fling open wide the portals of joy and truth." These qualities redeem the temporal to the immortal, for immortality is a condition of the soul, not a definite period in time. The soul, now and here, may put on immortality. Life is, after all, an affair of the immortal self, and it is the invisible powers which are its stay, its guide, and its inspiration. We live and move and have our being on the divine side of things. We only live—in any true sense—as we are filled with the heavenly magnetism. "Thou hast made[Pg 208] known to me the ways of life; thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance," says the apostle. Here is the true gospel to live by. There are "ways of life;" even through toil and trial they shall be reached. The one is eternal, the other temporal. It is unwise to lay too much stress on the infelicities of the moment. Exaltation alone is real; depression is unreal. The obstacle before one is not intended to stop progress, but to stimulate new energies to the overcoming.

"By living so purely in thought and in deed as to prevent the interposition of any barrier between his phenomenal and substantial self; and by steadfastly cultivating harmonious relations between these two,—by substantiating the whole of his system to the Divine Central Will, whose seat is in the soul,—the man gains full access to the stores of knowledge laid up in his soul, and attains to the cognition of God and the universe."

Among the "devastators of a day" there is encountered, however, a vast army of persons who advertise themselves vociferously as being wonder-workers of human life. According to their insistent proclamations, poverty is a "dis[Pg 209]ease," and is to be cured by a course of correspondence lessons; beauty, address, gifts and graces and power, are secrets of which they hold the key; even death, too, is but another mental malady and is easily to be overcome by their recipes. All these fraudulent representations—as absurd as they are false—are but the gross distortion of the underlying truth that thought creates conditions and controls results. Thought cannot transform poverty into wealth by means of six lessons; but the right quality of thought can set in motion the causes which, carried on to fulfilment, result in an increasing prosperity and welfare. One may thus achieve the top of his condition through serenity and poise of spirit, and thus be enabled to see events and combinations in their true perspective. He is not overwhelmed and swept into abysses of despair because some momentary disaster has occurred, but he regards it in its relative significance to the general trend of matters, and thus remains master of the situation.

Still, if there are spurious claims to the power of the magician, and if these claims, paraded by the idle, invade disastrously the realms of the[Pg 210] industrious in a continual procession of interruptions, there is something, too, to be said on the side of another—and a very genuine sort of wonder-working,—to transmute these interruptions into opportunities.

Individuality is the incalculable factor in life, and it is one, too, that must be fully allowed for, if one would proceed as harmoniously as possible among the unseen brambles and pitfalls that may beset his onward pathway. A very large proportion of the discords of life arise from the failure to take into consideration the special qualities in their special grouping that determine the person with whom one has to do,—qualities which are, practically, unalterable, and must simply be accepted and borne with as best one may. There is the person, for instance, who is always and invariably behind time in every movement of his life. He leaves undone the things that ought to be done, until there is little use in doing them at all. He exhausts the patience and excites the irritability of his friend, who is, by nature, prompt and always up with the hour. There is the person who, from some latent cause in his character, always manages badly; who[Pg 211] reduces all his own affairs to confusion; who contrives to waste more money, time, and energy than industry and energy can produce; whose normal condition is a crisis of disaster, and who, if extricated from this seventy times seven, will contrive to fall into it again. All these, and a thousand variations on characters of this type, we see around us, or within ourselves, constantly, and a liberal proportion of the trial or discord incident to family life, or to friendship and companionship, is simply in constantly demanding of another that which he cannot give, which he does not possess. To ask of the habitual procrastinator that he shall be prompt; or of the defective manager that he shall keep his affairs in order and make the most and the best out of his possessions, is totally useless. In the evolutionary progress of life, he will probably, sometime and somewhere, learn wisdom and do better; but habit and temperament are not liable to meet a sea change into something new and strange all in the flash of a moment, and it is worse than useless to demand this, or to be irritated, or impatient, or even too sorrowful, because of this fact. There[Pg 212] are things that cannot be cured,—at least, not immediately. Therefore they must be endured. When one once makes up his mind to the acceptance of this theory it is astonishing to see how it simplifies the problem. The philosophy is merely to do one's own part, but not to make any superhuman effort to do the other person's part also. Let it go. There is no use in making a casus belli of the matter. Nothing is ever helped by irritation over it,—even the irritation of generosity and love, which seeks only the good of the other.

There is, for instance, the procrastinating correspondent. You write, and you want a reply, and you want it straightway. On your own part you would make it with the promptness and despatch of the United States mail itself, but your correspondent is not constructed after the fashion of a galvanic battery, and although he means to respond at once, he doesn't. He has not the temperamental apparatus that works in that way. He has, perhaps, a thousand qualities that are better, finer, more important, but he does not happen to have that particular one. What then? Shall you make his life and your[Pg 213] own a burden with complaint and reproach? By no means. Let it pass. It is a part of his individuality, and cannot—at the moment, at least—be altered. This one must frankly accept as the defect of his friend. But recognizing the defect need not blind one to the thousand virtues that his friend possesses.

In fact, as we have each and all our individual sins, negligences, and weaknesses, we may well limit our zeal for reform to our own needs, at least until we have achieved such perfection that we are entitled to require perfection on the part of our associates.

To the orderly, thrifty type of New England temperament nothing is more incompatible with sympathy than the bad management of the person not endowed with "faculty," as Mrs. Stowe well expresses it. And it must be conceded that a lack of the power essential to dominate the general affairs of life and keep them in due subordination and order, is an unmistakable draft on the affections. It is a problem as to just how far aid and sympathy do any good, and not infrequently the greater the real care and affection, the greater, too, is the irrita[Pg 214]tion and the annoyance. But even the annoyance born of tender interest and love, it is better not to feel too keenly. Let one do what he can,—do all that is reasonable and right to assist in counterbalancing the ills that arise from defective management, and then let it pass, and not take it into his mind as a source of constant anxiety. We have all our lessons to learn, and every failure brings its own discipline as the inevitable result. "Regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer," as Emerson so well says; "if not, attend to your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired."

Of society, in the true sense, social life offers comparatively little. In the midst of ceremonial assembling one is starved for companionship. One may live in the very heart of what is held to be a brilliant social season and be as unutterably lonely as if in a desert solitude. Indeed, the latter offers compensations which the former denies. There is a great deal of companionship, however unrecognized, in the cloud of witnesses that[Pg 215] encompass us round about, and whose presence is less vividly felt in the gleam and glitter of ceremonial society. The more general assemblages of clubs, teas, and receptions are so incorporated into the social system that no one could cancel these if he would, nor would he if he could. They have their uses. All exchange of human sympathies is good, even if it be somewhat superficial and spectacular. The more exclusive dinners are not without their special charm as occasions when conversation becomes possible on a less unsatisfactory scale than the exchange of inanities in crowded receptions. Yet, with due recognition of the stimulus and the brilliancy that may flash from a select group of people, the deeper truth remains that it is only in a more personal companionship that is found the supreme luxury of life, and that companionship is a relation existing solely between two, refusing its spell when that number is increased.

Nothing is less considered by society than companionship. It is considered an unheard-of waste of time to devote an entire evening to one guest, when, indeed, five, ten, or fifty might[Pg 216] be warmed, lighted, and fed in the same time. The fashionable hostess invites her friends to pay off her social debts. If she can pay off fifty or five hundred—in the time that she would give to one, she felicitates herself on her clever management. The idea of inviting her friends because she really wishes to talk with them would bewilder her. She does not converse; she "receives." She arrays herself in her smartest gown, and her social interchange with each guest consists in a graceful greeting and a no less graceful adieu, followed by an epoch of private gratitude that the required entertainment is over. She consults her visiting list and conscientiously arranges for her next reception, or dinner, or dance, in the fulfilment of what she is pleased to call her social duties. And all this, however superficial or spectacular it may be, has its place, and serves, with more or less success, to promote social meeting, preliminary acquaintance, out of which the choicest friendships sometimes spring. But it is quite possible to concede that certain formalities and ceremonial observances have their legitimate place without conceding that they monopolize the resources[Pg 217] of social enjoyment. When one comes to that—it is quite another matter.

The supreme gift and grace and enchantment of life is in sympathetic companionship. And this, in its truer sense, is a relation of spirit, an elective affinity, rather than a mere concurrence of intellectual or artistic tastes. It is quite possible for two persons to like Sargent's pictures, or to draw the line at the inane "society" play without, after all, finding themselves in any relations of especial sympathy. "Only that soul can be my friend," said Emerson, "which I encounter on the line of my own march; that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline to me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience." Margaret Fuller defined this sympathy as that of beings born under the same star. But phrases are of little worth,—the experience eludes all definitions and defies all phrasings. It exists by divine right, or it does not exist at all. It is a law unto itself. It is a recognition that has to do with the inward springs of thought and action.

Companionship is the inflorescence of social life,—its finest result, its most exquisite and[Pg 218] perfect ideal. But it requires a certain degree of fitness. It requires the choice organization, the nobler and the finer degree of spiritual development. The crude person can pass well enough in a social assemblage, but only the choicer individuality is fit for that finer and more subtle relation of companionship.

Yet this highest realization of social enjoyment is, for the most part, relegated to shreds and patches of time. The mornings must be given to lectures, readings, receptions, clubs, and teas; the evenings must be devoted to dinners, dances, opera, concerts, plays, or musicales. For communion of friend with friend, spirit with spirit, there is no time. The crowning joy of life, in its possibilities for sympathetic companionship, is ignored. For companionship is a spiritual joy, and society recognizes only the spectacular pleasures. The finer order of social life for which the world were well lost, awaits its evolution.

"The life a man lives and the life he ought to live belong together. The real and the ideal lie side by side in the thought of God."[Pg 219]

The distractions of life are every day's tragedy. The mutilation of purpose, the disintegration of time, the neutralization of all endeavor, which result from the perpetual occurrence of the unforeseen, cannot but prefigure itself as a theme for meditation to the worker who looks back on a day, a week, a month, an entire season, in which "the flighty purpose" has never been overtaken. The calendar has the inexorableness of fate. The day, the month, goes by, unrelenting. It may be shattered with feeble and inexpressive demands, but all the same it is gone, and it is unreturning. Whether freighted richly with the essential, or merely burdened with the ineffectual, it is equally irretrievable.

This involves a problem of life full of spiritual perplexity. Certainly, no man liveth to himself, or, if he does, his living is a selfish and worthless thing. Certainly a man is his brother's keeper—to a degree. The poet whose dream is about to crystallize in verse is assured that life is more than art, and that to sustain the spirits of the depressed caller who appears at that precise instant, with the unfailing instinct with which the depressed do invariably appear at a literary[Pg 220] crisis,—he is assured that this act is a "nobler poem" than any he could write. And such is the tremendous impression that the gospel in the air of the service of humanity makes on us all, that he dare not disregard this possibility. He is not absolutely sure, it is true, that he is "serving humanity" in this individual instance, but he is not at all sure that it is not true; and he reflects that other days are coming, when, perhaps, by some divine dispensation, the depressed caller will not appear! But there are no days on which he, or his prototype, is not on hand, and so the problem ever remains a present, an immediate, and, alas! an insoluble one. For this is an age when the depressed, who have nothing to do, require, to sustain their drooping spirits, the sympathetic ministrations of those who are too busy to indulge in the languid luxury of gentle and romantic sadness. In fact, they feel a certain inalienable right to demand that current of sympathetic interest which otherwise would express itself in the specific work in which one is engaged. "You desire to 'serve humanity,' do you?" the depressed caller says, virtually, as he fixes the[Pg 221] mere worker with his glittering eye. "Well, I am Humanity. What is a book compared to a human soul? Here, before you, in living personality, is a need. Can you forsake it for abstract literature?"

If the unfortunate worker has any species of the New England conscience he is at a disadvantage. He has nothing to say for himself. There are behind him more than two centuries of his ancestors who have preached and practiced self-sacrifice, generosity, love. In one sense he is even enfeebled by his ethical nature. It possesses him, rather than enables him to clearly and consciously possess it. He feels a certain magnetic attraction to the fulfilment of a definite purpose; but after all, the world is full of purposes and of far greater and abler persons than himself to carry them on; and perhaps this particular appeal is from one of those "little ones" whom the Christ he holds in reverence bids him care for first of all. Perhaps the immediate human need should take precedence over specific work. Perhaps it is a real human need. "Treat the people as if they were real," said Emerson; "perhaps they are so." And so he becomes the[Pg 222] victim rather than the master of his own diviner life. He sees through a glass darkly. He is not in the least sure that he can do any good, but he is fearful he may do evil. And so he espouses what is really a negative side; a side of blind chance; a mere spiritual gambling, so to speak, and throws his stakes on the side of what may be useful, as he cannot prove to himself that it is not, and his life becomes a poor, mean, weak, ineffectual thing. He recalls Sir Hugo's counsel to Daniel Deronda: "Be courteous, be obliging, Dan; but don't give yourself over to be melted down for the tallow trade." He becomes sadly conscious that his entire time, purpose, energies are being simply, with his own dull consent, "melted down for the tallow trade," and that he himself is by way of being on a far more perilous margin than that of any one of the gently depressed spirits who devastate his days, and command him to create for them,—not energy, purpose, will,—but, instead, external conditions in which they may more luxuriously enjoy their romantic languor and their comforting consciousness of superior qualities.

Now is it not more than an open question that[Pg 223] when temptation assumes the masque of "service," it is no less temptation, and that it is evil disguised as good? The woman who reads the infinitely uplifting sermons of Rev. Doctor Charles G. Ames; who solaces what she is pleased to call her soul in that marvelously great work, "The Expansion of Religion," by Rev. Doctor E. Winchester Donald; who is excited—and mistakes it for being aroused—by Rev. Doctor Philip Moxom's noble book called "The Religion of Hope;" or who entertains similar emotions over recent new and great and uplifting books by Rev. Doctor George A. Gordon or Rev. Doctor Lyman Abbott, or many another, often evolves the pleasing fantasy that all she requires for producing the same quality of work is the illumination of personal interviews or personal correspondence with them. "Surely," she reasons, "these men are servants of the Lord, and I am one of the least of these whose needs they are divinely commanded to serve. Is not the life more than meat? Should not the minister break off his morning meditation—an abstract thing, at best—to see me, who needs an immediate infusion of encouragement?"[Pg 224]

And the tragedy of this is that the worker, who is true to his own purpose,—through good report or through ill report,—to the duties he is divinely commissioned to perform, is not infrequently entirely misunderstood. The woman who sends him a voluminous manuscript, accompanying pretty phrasings regarding his work, and modestly requesting that he shall read it, give his "views" on it, and decide just what editor or publisher will be rejoiced to issue it,—and who receives her pages of outpouring back by return mail with a note, however courteous, expressing his inability to fulfil this commission,—this woman becomes, as a rule, the enemy of the person who declines to be "melted down for the tallow trade." She may do no particular harm, but the antagonism is there. This, however, could be borne; but the nature sensitive to shades of human need is always liable to torture itself because of any failure to meet a specific demand. And this torture is disintegrating to that force of positive energy which a special work requires.

Is there not, then, a need for the gospel of one's own endeavor? that a given line of work,[Pg 225] plainly revealed in hours of mystic communion with the Divine, indicated by the subtle trend of circumstance and condition,—is there not a need of realizing so clearly that it is the duty apportioned to the one fitted for it, that it shall inspire fidelity and reverence,—even at the risk of what the unthinking may describe as selfish absorption? For there are vast varieties of ministering for ministering spirits. The work of the social settlement is divine; but the poet and the painter, if they produce poems and paintings, cannot devote their time to its work. And the poems and the pictures have their value, as well as service in giving food and clothing to those in need. The special gift does require special conditions, and it is not selfish to insist on those conditions, when the special work is held as unto the Lord. It often requires more heroism, more faith, more love to deny than to accede to a given request. To yield is often easy; to be steadfast to one's own purpose, shining like a star upon the horizon, is not infrequently very difficult.

No pilgrimage of the Crusaders of old could be more impressive in its spiritual results than that which can be made to-day to the Grand Cañon of the Colorado in Arizona. The majesty and sublimity of the scene suggest another world, not, indeed, an "Inferno," but a "Paradiso." It is a sea of color, a very New Jerusalem, on which one looks down from the rim of this Titanic chasm. It is a vision not less wonderful than that beheld by Saint John in the Isle of Patmos.

The term "cañon" is a misnomer for this supreme marvel of earth. One journeys to it anticipating a colossal variation on Cheyenne Canon or the Royal Gorge. Instead, what does the tourist see?

The ridge of a vast mountain-chain over two hundred miles in length split asunder in a yawning chasm eighteen miles in width and over seven thousand feet deep; one in which a thousand Niagaras would be lost; in which a cliff that, relatively to the scene, does not impress one as especially lofty, yet which exceeds in height the Eiffel Tower in Paris; and another which does not arrest special attention, yet is taller than[Pg 227] the Washington Monument. But the splendor of apparent architectural creations arrests the eye. "Solomon's Temple," the "Temple of Vishnu," and altars, minarets, towers, pagodas, colonnades, as if designed by architectural art, lie grouped in wonderful combinations of form and color.

"An Inferno, swathed in soft, celestial fires; a whole chaotic underworld, just emptied of primeval floods, and waiting for a new creative word; a boding, terrible thing, unflinchingly real, yet spectral as a dream, eluding all sense of perspective or dimension, outstretching the faculty of measurement, overlapping the confines of definite apprehension. The beholder is at first unimpressed by any detail; he is overwhelmed by the ensemble of a stupendous panorama, a thousand square miles in extent, that lies wholly beneath the eye, as if he stood upon a mountain peak instead of the level brink of a fearful chasm in the plateau whose opposite shore is thirteen miles away. A labyrinth of huge architectural forms, endlessly varied in design, fretted with ornamental devices, festooned with lace-like webs formed of talus from the upper cliffs, and painted with every color known to the palette in[Pg 228] pure transparent tones of marvellous delicacy. Never was picture more harmonious, never flower more exquisitely beautiful. It flashes instant communication of all that architecture and painting and music for a thousand years have gropingly striven to express. It is the soul of Michael Angelo and of Beethoven.

"The spectacle is so symmetrical, and so completely excludes the outside world and its accustomed standards, it is with difficulty one can acquire any notion of its immensity. Were it half as deep, half as broad, it would be no less bewildering, so utterly does it baffle human grasp. Something may be gleaned from the account given by geologists. What is known to them as the Grand Cañon district lies principally in northwestern Arizona, its length from northwest to southeast in a straight line being about one hundred and eighty miles, its width one hundred and twenty-five miles, and its total area some fifteen thousand square miles. Its northerly beginning, at the high plateaus in southern Utah, is a series of terraces, many miles broad, dropping like a stairway step by step to successively lower geological formations, until in Arizona the platform is reached which borders the real chasm and extends southward beyond, far into the central[Pg 229] part of that territory. It is the theory of geologists that ten thousand feet of strata have been swept by erosion from the surface of this entire platform, whose present uppermost formation is the Carboniferous; the deduction being based upon the fact that the missing Permian, Mesozoic, and Tertiary formations, which belong above this Carboniferous in the series, are found in their place at the beginning of the northern terraces referred to. The theory is fortified by many evidences supplied by examination of the district, where, more than anywhere else, mother earth has laid bare the secrets of her girlhood. The climax in this extraordinary example of erosion is, of course, the chasm of the Grand Cañon proper, which, were the missing strata restored to the adjacent plateau, would be sixteen thousand feet deep. The layman is apt to stigmatize such an assertion as a vagary of theorists, and until the argument has been heard it does seem incredible that water should have carved such a trough in solid rock. It is easier for the imagination to conceive it as a work of violence, a sudden rending of earth's crust in some huge volcanic fury; but it appears to be true that the whole region was repeatedly lifted and submerged, both under the ocean and under a fresh-water sea, and that during the period[Pg 230] of the last upheaval the river cut its gorge. Existing as the drainage system of a vast territory, it had the right of way, and as the plateau deliberately rose before the pressure of the internal forces, slowly, as grinds the mills of the gods, through a period to be measured by thousands of centuries, the river kept its bed worn down to the level of erosion; sawed its channel free, as the saw cuts the log that is thrust against it. Tributaries, traceable now only by dry lateral gorges, and the gradual but no less effective process of weathering, did the rest."

In the innermost depths of this colossal chasm runs the Colorado River. Descending the stupendous crags and terraces by one of the two or three "trails," the traveller at last stands upon a sandy rift confronted by nearly vertical walls many hundred feet high, at whose base a black torrent pitches in a giddying onward slide that gives him momentarily the sensation of slipping into an abyss.

"With so little labor may one come to the Colorado River in the heart of its most tremendous channel, and gaze upon a sight that heretofore has had fewer witnesses than have the wilds of Africa. Dwarfed by such prodi[Pg 231]gious mountain shores, which rise immediately from the water at an angle that would deny footing to a mountain sheep, it is not easy to estimate confidently the width and volume of the river. Choked by the stubborn granite at this point, its width is probably between two hundred and fifty and three hundred feet, its velocity fifteen miles an hour, and its volume and turmoil equal to the Whirlpool Rapids of Niagara. Its rise in time of heavy rain is rapid and appalling, for the walls shed almost instantly all the water that falls upon them. Drift is lodged in the crevices thirty feet overhead."

Descending to this ledge the tourist "can hardly credit Powell's achievement, in spite of its absolute authenticity. Never was a more magnificent self-reliance displayed than by the man who not only undertook the passage of the Colorado River, but won his way. And after viewing a fraction of the scene at close range, one cannot hold it to the discredit of three of Major Powell's companions that they abandoned the undertaking not far below this point. The fact that those who persisted got through alive is hardly more astonishing than that any should[Pg 232] have had the hardihood to persist. For it could not have been alone the privation, the infinite toil, the unending suspense in constant menace of death that assaulted their courage; these they had looked for; it was rather the unlifted gloom of those tartarean depths, the unspeakable horrors of an endless valley of the shadow of death, in which every step was irrevocable....

"Not the most fervid pictures of a poet's fancy could transcend the glories revealed in the depths of the Cañon; inky shadows, pale gildings of lofty spires, golden splendors of sun beating full on façades of red and yellow, obscurations of distant peaks by veils of transient shower, glimpses of white towers half drowned in purple haze, suffusions of rosy light blended in reflection from a hundred tinted walls. Caught up to exalted emotional heights, the beholder becomes unmindful of fatigue. He mounts on wings. He drives the chariot of the sun."

The language is not yet invented that can suggest any adequate idea of the Grand Cañon. Nor can it be painted or photographed, or in any way pictorially reproduced in a manner to afford any suggestion, even, of its sublimity[Pg 233] in design and its perpetual enchantment of color. One beholds the temples and towers and mosques and pagodas glowing in rose-red, sapphire blue, with emerald and amber and amethyst, all blending, and swimming, apparently, in a sea of purple, or of pearl gray mist, the colors flashing through like flame under alabaster. The sunlight changes as the day wears on, and so this play of color changes,—glowing, fading, paling, flaming. Watching these magical effects from dawn to sunset, watching the panorama of color as it deepens into mysterious shadows and spectral illusions under the moonlight, one can only say, "What hath God wrought!" To contemplate this marvellous and sublime spectacle is to come into a new perception of the Divine creation.

Formerly almost as inaccessible as the Himalayas, the Grand Cañon in Arizona can now be reached by the most luxurious methods of modern travelling. From Williams, on the Santa Fé road, a branch line of sixty miles runs over the rolling mesas to the "Bright Angel" hotel at the "Bright Angel Trail." The journey is en[Pg 234]chanted by beautiful views of the San Francisco mountains seen through a purple haze.

The entire journey through Arizona offers one of the most unique experiences of a lifetime. Is this "The Country God Forgot"? The vast stretch of the plains offer effects as infinite as the sea. The vista includes only land and sky. The cloud forms and the atmospheric effects are singularly beautiful. As one flies on into Arizona this wonderful color effect in the air becomes more vivid. Mountains appear here and there: the journey is up a high grade, and one realizes that he is entering the altitudes.

A special feature of interest in Arizona is the town of Flagstaff, famous for the great Lowell Observatory, established there by Percival Lowell, a nephew of the noble John Lowell, who founded the Lowell Institute in Boston. Professor Percival Lowell is a man of broad and varied culture, a great traveller, who has familiarized himself with most things worth seeing in this sublunary sphere, and has only failed to explore Mars from reasons quite beyond his own control. At his own expense he has founded here an Observatory, with a telescope of great[Pg 235] power, by means of which he is making astronomical researches of the greatest value to science. The special advantage of Arizona in astronomical study is not the altitude, but in the fact that there is the least possible vibration in the air here. Mr. Lowell's work makes Flagstaff a scientific centre of cosmopolitan importance, and scholars and great scientists from all over the world are constantly arriving in the little Arizona mountain town to visit the Observatory.

Flagstaff has no little archæological interest, also; the famous cliff dwellings of the Zuni tribe, which Frank Cushing explored and studied so deeply, are within a few miles of the town, located on the summit and sides of an extinct volcano. They now present the appearance of black holes, a few yards deep, often surrounded with loose and broken stone walls, and broken pottery abounds all over the vicinity. The most remarkable group of the cliff dwellers is to be seen in Walnut Cañon, eight miles from Flagstaff. This is one of the deep gorges, the cliffs rising several hundred feet above the valley; and they are sheer terraced walls of limestone, running for over three miles. In these terraces, in[Pg 236] the most singularly inaccessible places, are dozens of the cliff dwellings. Some of them are divided into compartments by means of cemented walls, and they retain traces of quite a degree of civilization.

The petrified forests of Arizona are a most extraordinary spectacle, with its acres of utter desolation in its giant masses of dead trees lying prostrate on the ground. Arizona is a land of the most mysterious charm. The Grand Cañon alone is worth a pilgrimage around the world to see,—a spectacle so bewildering that words are powerless to suggest the living, changing picture. "Long may the visitor loiter upon the rim, powerless to shake loose from the charm, tirelessly intent upon the silent transformations until the sun is low in the west. Then the cañon sinks into mysterious purple shadow, the far Shinumo Altar is tipped with a golden ray, and against a leaden horizon the long line of the Echo Cliffs reflects a soft brilliance of indescribable beauty, a light that, elsewhere, surely never was on sea or land. Then darkness falls, and should there be a moon, the scene in part revives in silver light, a thousand spectral forms projected[Pg 237] from inscrutable gloom; dreams of mountains, as in their sleep they brood on things eternal."

I hung my verses in the wind,
Time and tide their faults may find.
All were winnowed through and through,
Five lines lasted sound and true;
Five were smelted in a pot
Than the South more fierce and hot;
These the siroc could not melt,
Fire their fiercer flaming felt,
And the meaning was more white
Than July's meridian light.
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
Nor time unmake what poets know.
Have you eyes to find the five
Which five hundred did survive?

—Emerson.

Not only verses, but lives, are "winnowed through and through," and time and tide reveal their faults and their virtues. In the history of the State of Colorado there is one man whose life and work stand out in noble pre-eminence; whose character is one to inspire and to reward study as an example of intellectual and moral greatness. This man is Nathan Cook Meeker, the founder of the town of Greeley, Colorado;[Pg 238] the founder and for many years the editor of the Greeley "Tribune;" later appointed by President Hayes, in a somewhat confidential capacity, the Indian Commissioner at White River, where he died the death of a hero, and where, marking the spot of the tragic massacre, the town of Meeker now stands, among the mountains of the Snowy Range.

Mr. Meeker, who is one of the heroes of pioneer civilization, founded this town in the very desert of sand and sage-brush. Its first inception is a wonderful idyl of the extension of progress into the unknown West. The vision of the bands of singing angels in the air that fell upon the shepherds in the Judean plains was hardly more wonderful than the vision out of which the town of Greeley arose from the desert. On a December night in the late sixties Mr. Meeker found himself one evening standing under the brilliant starry skies of Colorado near the foot of Pike's Peak. The marvellous splendor of the scene filled his mind with sublime picturings. In the very air before him he seemed to see a city arise in the desert—a city of beautiful ideals, of high purposes, of temperance, educa[Pg 239]tion, culture, and religion. The vision made upon him that permanent impression which the heavenly vision, revealed for one instant to a life, forever makes, however swiftly it may be withdrawn; however deep and dark the eclipse into which it fades and seems forever lost.

To Mr. Meeker had been granted the angelic vision. The ideal had been revealed, and it was revealed in order that it might be realized in the outer and actual world. He felt the power, the nameless thrill of enchantment that pervades this wonderful country. One who is a poet in heart and soul has said of this Pike's Peak region:—

"Over the range is another world—a happy valley hundreds of miles in extent, fenced in with beauty and joy; palisaded with God's own temples; roofed with crystal and gold, and afloat in dream life; perpetual youth in thought and growth—all of it life to the soul; music and rapture to the weary traveller of earth. Oh, the leaping ecstasy of it by day and by night, and at the dawn!"

This indescribable ecstasy of the Colorado air communicated itself to Mr. Meeker. He went[Pg 240] home to New York; he called a meeting in Cooper Institute; Horace Greeley presided, and Mr. Meeker outlined his plans to the large audience. He presented them, also, in full detail in the columns of the "Tribune," and the result was that in 1870 he led a colony of some seven hundred to this most favorable site—now mid-way between two state capitols—fifty miles north of Denver and fifty miles south of Cheyenne; he laid out the town with broad boulevards and double rows of shade-trees while yet they lived in tents, and the shade-trees seen in his imagination are now an established fact. Greeley is to-day a town embowered in trees. The first work was to dig a canal at a cost of sixty thousand dollars, this being the initial experiment of upland irrigation. Such is, in outline, the history of Greeley, which the colony desired to name Meeker—for its founder—but which Horace Greeley's friend and associate editor insisted should bear its present name. Greeley is known as the "garden city" of Colorado, and that it was founded in faith and in ideals has been a determining fact in its quality of life and its phenomenal progress.[Pg 241]

Nathan Cook Meeker was born in the "Western Reserve," in Ohio, in 1814, coming of the order of people whom Emerson characterized as those "who go without the new carpet and send the boy to college." Behind him were a long list of distinguished ancestry, men who through successive generations had stood for achievements. Mr. Meeker in his youth taught school, went into journalism, was connected with the New York "Mirror," and later was associated with George D. Prentice on the Louisville "Journal," now the "Courier-Journal," edited by the brilliant Henry Watterson. A versatile writer in both prose and verse, he wrote two or three books, one of which he dedicated to President Pierce. He married a woman of great force and exaltation of character, a native of Connecticut, and a descendant of Elder Brewster. She shared his aims and ideals.

In the decade of 1860-70 Horace Greeley, who was always waving his divining rod to see if it indicated the proximity of genius, discovered Mr. Meeker, and invited him to become the agricultural editor of the "Tribune," succeeding Solon Robinson. Mr. Meeker's work made a[Pg 242] strong impression on the reading public of the day, and even Emerson inquired as to the authorship of some of Mr. Meeker's editorial work, which won the appreciation of the Concord seer.

In 1868 Mr. Meeker made a trip to the West for the "Tribune," writing a series of valuable letters embodying his observations of the country. It was during this journey that the night came which lends itself to imaginative picturing with dramatic vividness when, just after Christmas, he stood in the Garden of the Gods near the foot of Pike's Peak, while the stars of the Colorado skies blazed above him, and, as if by a flash of vision saw a town arise in the desert. The vision fell upon him like an inspiration. Founding towns seemed, indeed, to run in the family, as one of his ancestors had founded the town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, naming it after his wife.

Mr. Meeker returned to the Tribune office with his dream of a beautiful city to arise out of the sand and sage-brush of the desert. An idealist himself, Mr. Meeker had also the good fortune of having married a woman capable of sharing ideal dreams and of rising to the heights[Pg 243] of sacrifice, and she, too, embraced his new enthusiasm.

"Go ahead," replied Mr. Greeley, when Mr. Meeker mentioned his new project, "the 'Tribune' will back you."

A meeting was then called in Cooper Institute, as before stated, Horace Greeley presiding, and John Russell Young entering into the idea with sympathy. Mr. Meeker presented his project of a Union colony to establish itself in Colorado. Of the conditions he said:—

"The persons with whom I would be willing to associate must be temperance men and ambitious to establish good society, and among as many as fifty, ten should have as much as ten thousand dollars each, or twenty should have five thousand dollars each, while others may have from two thousand to one thousand dollars and upward. For many to go so far without means could only result in disaster."

The members were to each contribute one hundred and fifty-five dollars to a fund to purchase and prepare the land. It was in April of 1869 that the committee made the purchase of forty thousand acres, located between the Cache[Pg 244] la Poudre and the South Platte rivers, twenty-five miles from the Rocky Mountains and in full sight of Long's Peak. Greeley has a beautiful situation, and a perfection of climate that perhaps exists hardly anywhere else in all Colorado. Whatever the heat of the day, the nights are cool. The days are so bright, so beautiful, that they seem a very foretaste of paradise.

In the spring of 1870 the seven hundred members of Union Colony, with their families, arrived.

"In particular should moral and religious sentiments prevail, for without these qualities man is nothing. At the same time tolerance and liberality should also prevail. One thing more is equally important. Happiness, wealth, and the glory of a state spring from the family, and it should be our aim and a high ambition to preserve the family pure in all its relations, and to labor with the best efforts life and strength can give to make the home comfortable, to beautify and to adorn it, and to supply it with whatever will make it attractive and loved."

He added: "I make the point that two[Pg 245] important objects will be gained by such a colony. First, schools, refined society, and all the advantages of life in an old country; while, on the contrary, where settlements are made by the old method, people are obliged to wait twenty, forty, or more years. Second, with free homesteads as a basis, with the sale of reserved lots for the general good, the greatly increased value of real estate will be for the benefit of all the people, and not for schemers and speculators. In the success of this colony a model will be presented for settling the remainder of the vast territory of our country."

Every deed granted forbade the sale of intoxicating liquors. The town was founded in the purest moral ideals of education, culture, faith, and prayer, and Greeley is everywhere pointed out to the tourist in Colorado as one of the most interesting features of the Centennial state.

Of the town Mr. Meeker himself said in one of his letters to the "Tribune": "Individuals may rise or fall, may live or die; property may be lost or gained; but the colony as a whole will prosper, and the spot on which we labor so long[Pg 246] as the world stands will be a centre of intelligence and activity."

In 1876 Mr. Meeker was appointed commissioner from Colorado to the Centennial Exposition. He was strongly talked of for Congress, but his destiny led elsewhere.

Early in the seventies he founded "The Greeley Tribune," which he edited with conspicuous ability, making it the leading country paper of that part of the state.

The Indian troubles became a prominent problem of the government in the decade of the seventies, and this question deeply engaged Mr. Meeker's attention. He had his own theories regarding their treatment—ideas much in advance of his time, and which in some respects have been adopted in the best Indian legislation in Washington within the past two years. One point in Mr. Meeker's policy was that "work should go hand in hand and to some extent precede school education"—an insight comprising much of the truth taught to-day by the more eminent leaders of industrial education, and one which the recent Indian legislation, during the fifty-seventh Congress, has recognized. Mr.[Pg 247] Meeker believed that the Indian could be advanced into the peaceful arts of civilized life, and this aim he held with conspicuous courage and fidelity.

With a desire to carry out these theories, Mr. Meeker applied for and received, under President Hayes, the post of commissioner to the Utes on White River in Colorado, his appointment being, as before stated, of a somewhat confidential nature, and charged with more important responsibilities than are usually included in this office. Mr. Meeker entered on the duties of this position with much that same high and noble purpose that inspired General Armstrong in his work at Hampton.

General Hall of Colorado, who is said to be the most authoritative historian of that state, thus wrote of Mr. Meeker's entrance on the agency at White River.

"In the spring of 1878 Mr. Meeker, founder of Union Colony and the now beautiful city of Greeley, at his own solicitation was appointed resident agent, succeeding several who had attempted to carry this benevolent enterprise into effect, but without material success. He was a venerable philanthropist,[Pg 248] eminently representing the humanitarian school of the Atlantic seaboard, under the example of Horace Greeley, whom he revered above all the public men of his time.

"Thoroughly imbued with the purpose of educating, refining, and Christianizing the wild rovers of the mountains, and longing for an opportunity to put his cherished theories into practice, confident of his ability to bring about a complete transformation of their lives and character, he entered upon the work with deep enthusiasm. His ideals were splendid, eminently worthy of the man and the cause; but, unhappily, he had to deal with savages, of whose natures he was profoundly ignorant. He took with him his wife and youngest daughter, Josephine, and also a number of mechanics from Union Colony to aid in the great work of regeneration and redemption."

The Honorable Alva Adams of Pueblo, Colorado, ex-Governor of the state, writing of Nathan Cook Meeker, said:—

"Meeker was a patriot, and no soldier upon the field of battle was more loyal, and no one in the annals of our country has ever made a more awful sacrifice than the Meekers. But I need not tell the story. Back of it is the incompetent treatment of the Indians[Pg 249] that was responsible for the Meeker massacre. Upon the government rests the blood and outrage of the Meekers. Nor can I recall that the Indians were ever adequately punished for the crime. It is a black spot."

Mrs. Meeker entered into the views and the work of her husband in this new field with sympathetic comprehension and sustaining aid. Their youngest daughter, Josephine, who shared the idealism of the family, opened a free school for the Indians.

Mr. Meeker encountered peculiar difficulties over a period of several months, during which he appealed, unsuccessfully, for government aid and protection. General William T. Sherman, in his report (1879) to the Secretary of War, alludes to these troubles; General Pope was familiar with the situation, and Major Thornburg, at Fort Steele, held himself ready to send protection to Mr. Meeker at a day's notice; but the government failed to give that notice.

The tragedy came swiftly and suddenly, like the fates in a Greek drama, and on September 29, 1879, Mr. Meeker was brutally massacred, his wife and daughter were taken into captivity,[Pg 250] where, for twenty-three days, until rescued by General Adams, they endured unspeakable sufferings, and the agency buildings and their contents were burned.

To the awful spectacle of her husband's mutilated body, his wife—a woman of gentle birth and breeding—was led by the Indians, in their savage cruelty, to thus first learn of the tragedy. Through her agony of tears she pleaded to be allowed to stop and kiss the cold lips of him whose faithful, tender companion and wife she had been for thirty-five years. This last sacred consolation was denied her. With diabolical glee they reviled her tears and her prayers.

Her daughter Josephine, a girl of twenty, with the Evangeline type of face, was torn from her arms and hurried away into a deep, lonely cañon, which is now called "Josephine Valley." Mrs. Meeker herself was shot in her hip and left lame for life. She was thrust on a horse without even a saddle and carried off into the lonely mountains in this terrible captivity. Yet so sublime is the character of Mrs. Meeker in her deep religious feeling that in this moment of supreme desolation,—her husband's murdered[Pg 251] body left alone on the ground; her daughter snatched from her arms; her home in smoking ruins behind her,—so remarkable is her character in its religious exaltation, that even in this hour of supreme agony she could say, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him!"

A little mountain town of some five hundred inhabitants, named Meeker, for the heroic man who there met his tragic death, now marks the site of the massacre. Even at this day it is forty-five miles from the nearest railroad station, Rifle, on the Denver and Rio Grand scenic route. The little town reminds one of Florence, Italy, in the way it is surrounded by amethyst mountains, and the White River on which it is located is far more beautiful than the turbid Arno. The name of Nathan Cook Meeker is held in the greatest reverence by the people of the entire region.

On an August afternoon more than twenty years after this tragedy a visitor to Colorado stood on the site of the massacre under a sky whose intense blue rivalled that of Italy. With the peaceful flow of the river murmuring in the air and the hum of insects in the purple-[Pg 252]flowered alfalfa, the tragic scene seemed to rise again and impressed its lesson,—the ethical lesson of apparent defeat, disaster, and death in the outer and temporal world, while, on the spiritual side, it was triumph and glory and the entrance to the life more abundant. The man might be massacred,—the idea for which he stood cannot die. It rises from the apparent death and is resurrected in the form of new and nobler and more widely pervading ideals which communicate their inspiration to all humanity.

In the cemetery of Greeley lie buried the body of Mr. Meeker and of his daughter Josephine, whose early death followed close upon the tragedy. The aged widow, now in her eighty-ninth year, still survives, occupying her home in this Colorado town. Mrs. Meeker retains all her clearness of intellect; all her keen interest in the affairs of the day. She reads her daily newspapers, writes letters that are models of beautiful thought and exquisite feeling, and still continues to write the verse which through life has been the natural expression of her poetic nature. Mrs. Meeker writes verses as a bird sings—with a natural gift full of spontaneous music.[Pg 253]

The work of Nathan Cook Meeker in all that makes for industrial and social progress and moral ideals contributed incalculable aid to Colorado. All over the state the tourist is asked, "Have you seen Greeley? That is our ideal town."

During all the years of Mr. Meeker's residence in Colorado he remained a staff correspondent of the "Tribune." Horace Greeley went to the West and visited the Colony; and in the fine high school building of Greeley to-day, there hang, side by side, the portraits of Horace Greeley and Nathan Cook Meeker.

In this world in which we live events are not finished when they have receded into the past. They persist in the texture of life. They stand for certain fulfilments, and, like Banquo's ghost, they will "not down" until their complete significance is worked out to its final conclusion.

It always avails. It matters little as to amassing of possessions; but it matters greatly as to the purity of a man's motives and the degree to which he keeps faith with his ideals. Un[Pg 254]falteringly, even unto death, did Nathan Cook Meeker keep faith with those ideals that revealed themselves to him.

A noble work like that of Mr. Meeker is like the seed sown which is not quickened except it die. Sown in weakness, it is raised in power; sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. The three years of the ministry of Jesus on earth ended in defeat, disaster, and death. Was his life thereby a failure? Who has won the triumph's evidence—Pilate or Christ? Lincoln had to die that the nation might live. Heroism is forever being crowned with martyrdom.

All life is better to-day for every noble individual life that has been lived in the world. Nathan Cook Meeker was one who literally gave his life to lofty ideals, and this hero whom the Silver State holds in honor and reverence merits the recognition of the nation.

"The only affections which live eternally are those of the soul—those which have struck deep into the man and made part of his inmost being. The loves of the earthly mind die with it and form no part of the permanent man....[Pg 255] To enter the heavenly sphere and to come into communion with souls a generated state is necessary. There are four atmospheres surrounding us, and only in the highest of these do we find the freed soul. Interior knowledge, earnest aspiration, and purity of thought and life, are the keys by which alone can be opened the gates of the inmost and highest sphere. The lowest is enlightened by the natural sun. It is that of the present life of the body. The next is enlightened by the astral or magnetic light, and it is that of the sidereal body. The next is that of the soul, and it is enlightened by the spiritual sun. And the highest is the immediate presence of God."

Since the days of Jacob Behmen there have been no such remarkable series of mystic writings as are contained in the two volumes called "The Perfect Way" and "Clothed with the Sun," by Doctor Anna Kingsford. Her belief and her illuminations were crystallized in the affirmation, "Life is the elaboration of soul through the varied transformations of matter." She saw the entire purpose of creation to be the evolution and elaboration of the soul. Very little is generally known of Doctor Kingsford. She was descended from an old Italian family, one of whom had been[Pg 256] the architect of the Vatican, and, on her mother's side, from mingled German and Irish ancestry. She was the daughter of John Bonus, born in England in 1846, and she married, in 1867, Algernon Godfrey Kingsford, who subsequently took orders in the English Church. Three years later Mrs. Kingsford entered the Catholic communion, and some years afterward she studied medicine in Paris and received her degree. She is said to have been very beautiful, with great talent in painting and in music, a poet of lyric gifts, and from her childhood she saw visions and dreamed dreams. She died in 1888, and is buried in Atcham, near Shrewsbury, where her husband had his parish.

In 1881 Doctor Kingsford delivered in London, before drawing-room audiences, comprising representatives of literature, art, fashion, and the peerage,—audiences inclusive of the most notable people in London, the nine lectures that are published under the title of "The Perfect Way," and at the time these lectures inspired a profound interest. Their central theme is the Pre-existence and Perfectibility of the soul. "The intuition," she says, "is that portion of[Pg 257] the mind whereby we are enabled to gain access to the interior and permanent region of our nature, and there to possess ourselves of the knowledge which in the long ages of her past existence the soul has made her own. For that in us which perceives and permanently remembers is the soul. And all that she has once learned is at the service of those who duly cultivate relations with her." And those relations, she taught, are cultivated by living so purely in thought and deed as to prevent the interposition of any barrier between the phenomenal (or the outer) and the substantial (or the inner) self; and by steadfastly cultivating harmonious relations between those two, by subordinating the whole system to the Divine will,—thus does one gain full access to the stores of knowledge in the soul. Doctor Kingsford further explains:—

"For, placed as is the soul between the outer and the inner mediator, between the material and the spiritual, she looks inwards as well as outwards, and by experience learns the nature and method of God; and according to the degree of her elevation, purity, and desire, sees, reflects, and transmits God. It is[Pg 258] in virtue of the soul's position between the worlds of substance and of phenomenon, and her consequent ability to refer things to their essential ideas, that in her, and her alone, resides an instrument of knowledge competent for the comprehension of truth, even the highest, which she only is able to behold face to face. It is no hyperbole that is involved in the saying, 'The pure in heart see God.' True, the man cannot see God. But the divine in man sees God. And this occurs when, by means of his soul's union with God, the man becomes 'one with the Father', and beholds God with the eyes of God....

"And he to whom the soul lends her ears and eyes, may have knowledge not only of his own past history, but of the past history of the planet, as beheld in the pictures imprinted in the magnetic light whereof the planet's memory consists. For there are actually ghosts of events, manes of past circumstances, shadows on the protoplasmic mirror, which can be evoked.

"But beyond and above the power to read the memory of himself or of the planet, is the power to penetrate to that innermost sphere wherein the soul obtains and treasures up her knowledge of God. This is the faculty whereby true revelation occurs. And revelation, even in this, its highest sense, is, no less than reason, a natural appanage of man, and[Pg 259] belongs of right to man in his highest and completest measure of development."

Doctor Kingsford was an evolutionist, holding that development along evolutionary lines is a true doctrine, but she held that this development was not of the original substance, because that, being infinite and eternal, is always perfect; and that the development lay in the manifestation of the qualities of that substance, in the individual. "The highest product, man," she said, "is the result of the spirit working intelligently within. But man attains his highest and becomes perfect only through his own voluntary co-operation with the Spirit."

Doctor Kingsford regarded Jesus as a spiritual Ideal and an Eternal Verity, and Religion as an ever-present actuality.

"For every man makes his own fate, and nothing is truer than that character is destiny. It is by their own hands that the lines of some are cast in pleasant places, of some in vicious, and of some in virtuous ones, so that there is nothing arbitrary or unjust. But in what manner soever a soul conducts itself in[Pg 260] one incarnation, by that conduct, by that order of thought and habit, it builds for itself its destiny in a future incarnation. For the soul is enchained by these prenatal influences, which irresistibly force it into a new nativity at the time of such conjunction of planets and signs as oblige it into certain courses and incline it strongly thereto. But if the soul oppose itself to these influences and adopt some other course,—as it well may to its own real advantage,—it brings itself under a 'curse' for such period as the planets and ruling signs of that incarnation have power. But though this means misfortune in a worldly sense, it is true fortune for the soul in a spiritual sense. For the soul is therein striving to atone and make restitution for the evil done in its own past; and thus striving, it advances towards higher and happier conditions. Wherefore man is, strictly, his own creator, in that he makes himself and his conditions, according to the tendencies he encourages. The process of such reformation, however, may be a long one. For tendencies encouraged for ages cannot be cured in a single lifetime, but may require ages for their cure. And herein is a reflection to make us as patient towards the faults of others as we ought to be impatient of our own faults."

The entire interpretation of life, as given by Doctor Kingsford in these books, is remarkable, and is one of singular clearness in tracing the law of cause and effect.

"The question for man most momentous of all is whether or no he has an immortal soul; or—to avoid the word immortal, which belongs to the realm of infinities—whether or no his personality involves any element which can survive bodily death. In this direction have always lain the gravest fears, the farthest reaching hopes, which could either oppress or stimulate mortal minds.... The method of modern science—that process which consists in an interrogation of Nature entirely dispassionate, patient, systematic ... has never yet been applied to the all-important problem of the existence, the powers, the destiny of the human soul."

The Rev. Doctor Alexander Whyte of Edinborough, one of the few greatest and most celebrated preachers in Europe, said, in a sermon recently delivered in London, that the spiritual, like the physical life, required constant sustenance. Doctor Whyte dwelt with marked em[Pg 262]phasis on the important truth that no one who does not give at least one hour of the day to the concentration of thought on the higher purposes of life, and devote himself, essentially and especially, to aspiration and prayer, can live aright, and live up to his higher possibilities. Doctor Whyte especially recommended the last hour before sleep as the best season for this uplift of the soul to its native atmosphere. "It is not necessary," he said, "that one should be kneeling, in the attitude of prayer, all the time. Walk about. Go out and look at the stars. Read, if you prefer, some ennobling book. But, in whatever form thought and meditation may take, keep the key held to the divinest melody of life. In that way shall the spiritual life gather its rich strength and infinite energy." The principle is one that every life which has given to the world noble results, has acted upon, consciously or unconsciously, as may be. No one can live, in the sense of that life which is alone worth the living, without definite and constant periods of seeking that refreshment which is found in communion with God, and in setting one's spiritual forces in touch anew[Pg 263] with the infinite spiritual energy. Poet and prophet have emphasized this truth. Stephen Phillips, in his poem of "The Dead Soul," touches it most impressively. Without its own sustenance from the spiritual world, how could it survive?

The soul is ever "imploring dimly something beautiful," and it must have this or its powers remain latent and undeveloped. "Not in dead matter do we live," said Lord Kelvin, in his recent address before the British scientists, "but we live and move in the creative and directing power that science compels to be accepted as an article of faith. We are forced to believe, with absolute confidence, in a directive power,—in an influence other than the physical, dynamic, and electric powers. Science is not antagonistic to religion, but a help to religion," he added; "science positively affirms creative power, and makes every one feel a miracle in himself."

The soul has certainly a door into infinite beauty, and through the portals must it fare[Pg 264] forth to renew its activities in its own atmosphere. The question as to whether the individual survives bodily death is one that the Twentieth Century will answer with no unmistakable reply. The investigation into the very nature of man is one possible on strictly scientific lines, whose results agree with and confirm all that Faith has intuitively divined.

This investigation—pursued in many ways—is best of all pursued in keeping some hour apart, each day, for absolute reunion and communion with the Holy Spirit. To lift up the heart to God in deepest aspiration and prayer is to come into an increasing knowledge of one's own spiritual self, and into increasing harmony with the divine world in whose atmosphere, alone, we live and breathe and have our being. In love and sympathy lie the daily solution of all the problems of the spiritual life.

These are the divine attributes, and they are as indispensable to life to-day as they were when Christ walked in Galilee. Compassion and love are the handmaids of hope and faith and joy. The heart to sympathize, the love to aid, lead on to the radiant atmosphere of happiness.[Pg 265]

There is a deep and impressive significance in the lesson of the music-drama of "Parsifal." "Only those of pure heart can be strong." And that "the Knights in the play were saved by Parsifal who was willing to encounter anything." This alone is the diviner quality of love,—to be willing to "encounter anything;"—to meet pain, disaster, defeat, if so it be the appointed way to serve. There is a consecration in pain that purifies and refines and exalts all effort. It may be the very divine sign and seal of approval when the way leads to personal sacrifice rather than to personal joy.

"The Magi," it is said, "have but to follow their Star in peace.... The Divine action marvellously adjusts all things. The order of God sends each moment the appropriate instrument for its work, and the soul, enlightened by faith, finds all things good, desiring neither more nor less than she possesses."

One may tread,—not the "whole round of creation," as Browning phrases it, but a minor segment of it, at least, and come back with added and more profound conviction that happiness is a condition of the spirit; that "the soul[Pg 266] is ceaselessly joyful"; that the incidents and accidents of the outward life cannot mar nor lessen that sense of higher peace and joy and harmony which is the atmosphere of any true spiritual life. One may recognize and affirm this truth by spiritual intuition, and he may then be led through many phases of actual tests in actual life; he may, for a time, lose his hold on it and come to say that happiness is a thing that depends on so many causes outside one's own control; that illness, death, loss of friends, adverse circumstances, failures and trials of all kinds may come into his experience, and that one is at the mercy of all these vicissitudes. Can the individual be happy, he will ask, when all that made happiness is taken away? Can he be happy if he has lost all his worldly goods? or if death has taken those nearest and dearest to him? or if the separations of life, far harder to bear than those of death, have come into his experience with their almost hopeless sense of desolation? And yet, until he has learned to answer these questions with the most triumphant affirmative, he has not learned the measure nor sounded the depth of a true and noble[Pg 267] order of Happiness. The difference is that of being safely on board a great steamer when wind and wave are tempest-tossed, or of being helpless in the raging waters. The storm may be precisely the same; the tempest may rage as it will, but safe and secure in the cabin or stateroom, the voyager does not mind its fury. Truly may this analogy be held in life. It is possible to emerge from the winds and waves; to enter so entirely into the sense of security in the Divine; to hold so absolutely the faith in the Divine leading, that even in the midst of trial and loss and deprivation and sorrow, one shall come to know, through his own experience, that "the soul is ceaselessly joyful." For it is one thing to accept a truth theoretically, to believe it intuitively, and another to prove it through experience that shall test the quality of faith and conviction. Learning this supreme truth of life through outward experiences as well as though inner revelation, is a victory of the will that may even make itself an epoch, a landmark, in spiritual progress.

One of the great discourses of Phillips Brooks had for its theme the lesson of not laying too[Pg 268] much stress on the recognition of one's motives or on any return of sympathetic consideration. "Let me not think," said Bishop Brooks, "that I get nothing from the man who misunderstands all my attempts to serve him and who scorns me when I know that I deserve his sympathy. Ah! it would be sad enough if only the men who understood us and were grateful to us when we gave ourselves to them had help to give us in return. The good reformer whom you try to help in his reform, and who turns off from you contemptuously because he distrusts you, seeing that your ways are different from his, does not make you happy,—he makes you unhappy; but he makes you good, he leads you to a truer insight, a more profound unselfishness. And so (it is the old lesson), not until goodness becomes the one thing that you desire, not until you gauge all growth and gain by that, not until then can you really know that the law has worked, the promise has been fulfilled. With what measure you gave yourself to him, he has given himself—the heart of himself, which is not his favor, not his love, but his goodness, the real heart of himself to you. For the rest you[Pg 269] can easily wait until you both come to the better world, where misconceptions shall have passed away and the outward forms and envelopes of things shall correspond perfectly with their inner substances forever."

In the last analysis one comes to realize that happiness is a condition depending solely on the relation of his soul to God; that neither life, nor death, nor principalities, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any living creature can separate him from it, because happiness and the love of God are one and identical, and it is not in the power of this world to give, or to take away, this sense of absolute oneness with the Divine life that comes when man gives himself, his soul and body, his hopes and aspirations and ideals, in complete consecration to the will of God.

For this alone is happiness. It may not be ease nor pleasure, but it is that ceaseless joy of the soul that may be the daily experience of every human being. And to gain the deep inner conviction of this sublime truth is worth whatever it may cost of tears or trial or desolation of spirit. It is the threshold of joy. It is the initiation into a higher spiritual state which[Pg 270] one may gain during his progress on earth as well as in heaven. In fact, no one is really fitted for the highest privileges and sweetness he may crave, until he has learned to live well, to live joyfully, without these. No one is fitted for joy until he can live well without joy. It is the law and the prophets.[Pg 271]

THE NECTAR OF THE HOUR.

I share the good with every flower,
I drink the nectar of the hour.

—Emerson.
[Pg 272]

If we knew how to greet each moment as the manifestation of the divine will we could find in it all the heart could desire. Nor what indeed is more reasonable, more perfect, more divine, than the will of God? Can its infinite value be increased by the paltry difference of time, place, or circumstance? The present moment is always filled with infinite treasures; it contains more than one is capable of receiving. Faith is the measure of these blessings; in proportion to your faith will you receive. By love also are they measured; the more your heart loves the more it desires, and the more it desires the more it receives. The will of God is constantly before you as an unfathomable sea, which the heart cannot exhaust; only in proportion as the heart is expanded by faith, confidence, and love can it receive of its fulness.... The divine will is an abyss of which the present moment is the entrance; plunge fearlessly therein and you will find it more boundless than your desires.—The Rev. J. P. De Caussade, in "Holy Abandonment."

"The moment we desire God and His will, that moment we enjoy them, and our enjoyment corresponds to the order of our desires."

What though the bough beneath thee break?
Remember, thou hast wings.

—Victor Hugo.

To enter into the will of God is an initiation of such power and beauty that language falters in any effort to interpret this supreme experience. It can be indicated only in the words of the poet:—

That wonderful test of seeing every event of life from the point of view of the will of God simply transforms and revolutionizes the entire scale of human experience. It simplifies all perplexities, it offers the solution for all problems.[Pg 274] It illuminates the small and the apparently insignificant occurrences which, nevertheless, contrive to play so large and often so determining a part in our days, as well as places in high relief the great questions that beset one in his varied round.

The little book from which the extract on the preceding page is taken—a Catholic book of devotion—is one of the most illuminating in all spiritual literature. It offers to one instruction and guidance in that life which alone is progress, peace, and joy,—and one who comes to use it daily will place it almost next to the Bible in its practical and almost miraculous helpfulness. Catholic or Protestant,—what matters it so that one who listens may hear the word? It is in no wise necessary to embrace Catholicism in order to concede that some of the most vital literature of the spiritual life is written by the priests and thinkers of that communion; and it is good to take help wherever one can find it,—regardless of sect or creed.

A French priest, preaching in an impassioned and sublime abandon of enthusiasm; caught up in a rapture of the heavenly life, poured[Pg 275] out these wonderful words to audiences that thronged the dim shades of Saint Sulpice, in Paris. His theme was the consecration of life to the divine will. He called upon all humanity to recognize that this divine will is revealed,—not exclusively in the cloister or the silence, but in the common trend of daily life. "The field is the world." "All things," said this priest, "may further the soul's union with God; all things perfect it, save sin, and that which is contrary to duty;" and he added: "When God thus gives Himself to a soul, all that is ordinary becomes extraordinary; therefore it is that nothing appears of the great work which is going on in the soul; the way itself is so marvellous that it needs not the embellishment of marvels which belong not to it. It is a miracle, a revelation, a continuous enjoyment of God, interrupted only by little faults; but in itself it is characterized by the absence of anything remarkable, while it renders marvellous all ordinary and sensible things."

The entire discourse was a fervent and illuminating illustration of how God's will reveals itself through the most common things. "O Divine Action," Père De Caussade exclaims,[Pg 276] "I will cease to prescribe to Thee hours or methods; Thou shalt be ever welcome. O Divine Action, Thou seemest to have revealed to me Thy immensity. I will walk henceforth in Thy infinity. No longer will I seek Thee within the narrow limits of a book, or the life of a saint, or a sublime thought. No longer will I seek Thy action alone in spiritual intercourse. For since the divine life labors incessantly and by means of all things for our advancement, I would draw my life from this boundless reservoir. The will of God imparts to its every instrument an original and incomparable action. We do not sufficiently regard things in the supernatural light which the divine action gives them. We must always receive and worthily meet the divine action with an open heart, full confidence and generosity: for to those who thus receive it, it can work no ill. The divine action killeth while it quickeneth; the more we feel death, the firmer our faith that it will give life."

These words invest the truth of the constant revelation of God's will through ordinary events, with a burning intensity and vividness that can[Pg 277] hardly fail to leave a permanent impress upon the reader.

There is probably no thoughtful observer of the phenomena of life with whom spiritual aspiration is ever present, who is not often honestly puzzled as to what extent the ordinary tide of events that attend him must be accepted as the will of God, and to what degree he should modify these by his own power of will in selection and grouping. He is engaged, for instance, in important work. To what extent should he yield to the "devastator of the day"? To what extent should he allow his general onward course of pursuits and interests to be deflected or changed by the unforeseen events that attend his pathway?

It may be accepted as a fundamental truth that good sense, good judgment, discretion, poise, are not unworthy to be ranked among the Christian virtues. Jesus was eminently sane. He was no fanatic. He gave both by precept and example the ideal of a rational and reasonable life. The individual has no right to rush off and kill himself because his dearest hope is denied or his most cherished purpose defeated.[Pg 278] Nor has he any more right to commit what may be called intellectual suicide, by relinquishing his aspirations and endeavors, merely because things go wrong, or because he thinks they are wrong. The conditions of life are not necessarily wrong because contrary to what one might desire. Perhaps it is the desire itself which was wrong, and the conditions which are right; and which are the expression of God's will and are thus to be joyfully accepted. The test of all circumstances and influence lies in unchanging fidelity, in unswerving allegiance to the divine ideal of life. The "devastator of a day" need not be welcomed to make unlimited waste of time and energy that have their due channels, but the interruption may be met with patience and sweetness, as well as with firmness of purpose in declining to be turned aside from the duty in hand. The adverse circumstances of life,—loss of money, of friends, disaster in one way or another, that may come without visible relation to any error on one's own part,—shall not such adverse conditions teach a divine lesson of patience and incite new springs of energy to overcome trial, and to gain by it a higher spirit[Pg 279]ual vantage-ground on which to live? Cannot even denial and defeat be held as developing qualities that might otherwise lie latent? May they not teach the divinest lesson of all,—the one most invaluable to human life,—absolute trust in God?

Gaining this, the soul really gains all that it was sent on earth to learn through all the varied phenomena of joy and sorrow, of triumph and failure. There is a common expression of one's "embracing religion and turning away from the world." It is a contradiction of terms. The world is the place in which any real religion is tested and proved, and it is there that the soul must recognize and receive the Divine Action.

In the marvellous sermons of Père Lacordaire are found suggestions that might well serve as a daily manual on this sublime and vital truth of the relation between the will of God and the daily experience. These sermons are among the world's treasures of help toward a higher spirituality. The argument of Père De Caussade—one equally entitled to consideration—is that God reveals himself to us now, in ordinary[Pg 280] events, as mysteriously and as adorably and with as much reality as in the great events of history or in the Holy Scriptures. "When the will of God reveals itself to a soul manifesting a desire to wholly possess her," says Père De Caussade, "if the soul freely gives herself in return, she experiences most powerful assistance in all difficulties; she then tastes by experience the happiness of that coming of the Lord, and her enjoyment is in proportion to the degree in which she has learned to practice that self-abandonment which must bring her at all moments face to face with this ever adorable will."

The entire philosophy of this is that the events of life are the language in which God speaks to us. The thought is as simple as it is impressive, and it is yet so great as to be fairly epoch-making in its complete realization. And it is more than an open question whether, even to a large majority of the most prayerful and ardent of Christian believers, there is not still a new aspect of life revealed in this simple acceptance of the common details of the day, the events of the hour, as the divine language which is to be read and followed.[Pg 281]

Because there is a more or less widespread conviction that events, circumstances, conditions are things to be battled with, in case they are not agreeable, and that there is a signal virtue in overcoming them. Nor is this conviction without value, too, and a large measure of truth, for aspiration and achievement must always be among the vital forces in creating the immediate future; and we must create the future as well as accept the present.

"Thou speakest, Lord, to all mankind by general events.
Thou speakest to each one in particular by the events of his
every moment."

"But instead of respecting the mystery of Thy words and hearing Thy voice in all the occurrences of life, they only see therein chance, the acts, the caprice of men; they find fault with everything; they would add to, diminish, reform. They revere the word of the Lord, but have they no respect for words which are not conveyed by means of ink and paper, but by what they have to do and suffer from moment to moment,—do these words merit nothing?"

This handwriting on the wall in the guise of the daily events is a message to be read by faith alone. Just here is the parting of the ways.

One fares forth in a certain direction, intent on a given accomplishment, and unforeseen circumstances arise that hinder, annoy, delay, or prevent the fulfilment of the intention. From one point of view, one would say that interruptions and disasters were things to be overcome as speedily as possible, and that the virtue lay in pressing on. But the theory of life so wonderfully set forth by this great preacher teaches, instead, that these very obstacles, delays and embarrassments are a signal and an important thing in and of themselves; that they are nothing less than the divine voice; the appointed means through which the voice of God speaks to us; that each moment, each hour, is just as valuable during delay and enforced pause as it could be for the most strenuous action, because,—the only important thing we have to do in this life is to bring our own will into harmony with the will of God; to learn to recognize His leading and to love this leading.[Pg 283]

Nor does this interpretation of the divine purposes of life lead the least in the world to inertia and dull passivity. On the contrary, it is, in essence, the theory to do all one can, ceaselessly and constantly; but, having done this, then await the results in a believing trust which is peace and love of harmony. The larger part of the events and circumstances that have to do with our lives are not under our personal control. No man liveth to himself. Regarding this large part of our lives that are not under our personal control, there is a perpetual tendency to fret, to worry, to impatience, to irritation, or to despondency, and the consequent loss of that cheerfulness and radiant exhilaration in which one should live if he live aright. Could one, then, regard all this part of his life which he cannot change, nor hasten, nor delay, nor alter in the slightest degree, one way or the other,—could he but recognize all this as the divine language and meet it,—not only with resignation but with that joyful acceptance of perfect faith which absolutely realizes the oneness of the will between himself and God,—then would not life gain, at once, immeasurably in peace and happiness?[Pg 284]

"Can the divine will err?" questions Père De Caussade. "Can anything that it sends be amiss? But I have this to do; I need such a thing; I have been deprived of the necessary means; that man thwarts me in such good works; this illness overtakes me when I most need my health."

The answer is: "No; the will of God is all that is absolutely necessary to you, therefore you do not need what He withholds from you—you lack nothing. If you could read aright these things which you call accidents, disappointments, misfortunes, contradictions, which you find unreasonable, untimely, you would blush with confusion, but you do not reflect that all these things are simply the will of God."

The life of faith, that perfect faith which is perfect peace, consists in this ever-present recognition, and, tested by its results,—tested by the absolute peace and the larger energy which is liberated by the cheerful and believing rather than the sad and distrusting state of mind,—tried by all those tests of actual experience, this attitude of perfect faith is the attitude most favorable to progress and achievement.

Renunciation is a word that stands for a great experience, and it is, perhaps, too often conceived of as relating to the material rather than to the spiritual life. The question as to whether one shall give up this or that article, or practice, during Lent, for instance, is sometimes in the air,—always with the saving clause that the renunciation is merely temporal, and if given up for forty days in the year, is to be fully enjoyed and revelled in on the other three hundred and twenty-five,—a clause that degrades a religious theory to a purely material plane. If it is better for one's command of his higher powers not to take coffee, for instance, during Lent, then it is better not to take it for the greater proportion of the year aside from Lent. If it is better to be gentle, tolerant, forgiving, and generous for forty days, it is still better to be so for three hundred and sixty-five days. There is really something absolutely absurd as well as repellent in the apparent acceptation that to live the higher, sweeter, fuller, nobler life is a penitential affair,—to be endured but not enjoyed, and limited chiefly to Lenten periods and the special holy days of the[Pg 286] Christian Church. For religion is the life, the continual life of every hour and moment, and consists in the quality of that constant life. The offices of religion, the ceremonial forms, are quite another matter. They have their place, and a most important one. The gathering together at stated hours and periods for the devotions of religious worship is so great an aid to the Christian life as well to be ranked indispensable to the community and the nation; and while it is true that the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life, yet the letter, rightly interpreted, is filled with the Spirit, and conveys it to us. The cry of certain reformers (?) that society has outgrown the Church, has little claim to consideration, for the Church itself is a progressive institution, and moves forward and enlarges itself with still larger revelations of the Divine Truth. The great opportunities for renunciation come not in the guise of temporal and material things; whether one shall eat or drink this thing or the other; whether he shall forego the theatre, or deprive himself of music, or array himself in sackcloth and ashes, or in purple and fine linen. The real question comes in the guise of the spiritual problems.[Pg 287]

One comes to know, for instance, of an act of his neighbor's which is really one of treachery and betrayal of trust. Circumstances arise in which he could put his finger upon the evidential chain revealing this lapse from integrity. Shall he do it? Perhaps in the spiritual vista three ways open to him. The one would be to reveal the affair publicly; but this is crude if not cruel, and to touch the spring that precipitates discord and controversy is hardly less disastrous than to precipitate war. Discord only engenders evil, and it never produces good results. Evil things must, of course, be resisted, and combat inevitably results,—but discord for the sake of revealing some one's inadvertences is invariably disastrous as well as morally wrong. Then there is the method of seeking the person directly, and laying before him his error, thus giving him the opportunity of any extenuating explanation, and protecting his reputation in the genuineness of true friendship, from the world. And this course is often the wisest as well as the noblest, and really requires more heroism than the former one. Yet, after these there is still another, and it is absolutely the[Pg 288] most potent, the most successful in its results, the most truly uplifting for all concerned. Has one been wronged, or misrepresented, or in any way injured? Let him commit it all, unreservedly, to the very immediate, the very real, the infinitely potent power of the divine world. Let him, as his own form of personal renunciation, absolutely forgive whatever annoyance or injury he has received, and let him pray, not for any vengeance against the wrong-doer, but that the Divine Love and Light would so envelop and direct the one who has erred as to enable him to free his own spirit from whatever fault he had been led into, and to rise into such regions of spiritual life that never again would he repeat it. How beautiful is the counsel given by Whittier:—

"My heart was heavy, for its trust had been
Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong.
So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men,
One summer Sabbath day I strolled among
The green mounds of the village burial-place;
Where, pondering how all human love and hate
Find one sad level, and how, soon or late,
Wronged and wrong-doer, each with meekened face,
[Pg 289]And cold hands folded over a still heart,
Pass the green threshold of our common grave,
Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart,
Awed for myself, and pitying my race,
Our common sorrow, like a mighty wave,
Swept all my pride away, and trembling
I forgave!"

Forgiveness,—forgiveness in love, and in readiness to aid and to rejoice in all future success of the one who had erred,—is not this the highest renunciation of the Christian life? Is it not this which is set before us in the progress of spirituality? Mutual forgiveness, mutual aid, mutual trust and sustaining, realizing that we all err and need to be forgiven even as we need to forgive,—shall we not in these touch the blessedness of sacrifice rather than its barren husk, and find in it that "soul of happiness" which should be the perpetual atmosphere of the higher life? For "this is the life eternal—to know Thee, the only true God," and humanity knows God just in proportion to the degree in which it is able to partake of the Divine Spirit and translate its religious aspiration into practical guidance for the affairs of the day.

Probably the one solution of the problem of life in all its intricacies and its perplexing and[Pg 290] baffling experiences lies in that trust in God which is the soul's absolute surrender to the Divine will. Even in this solution, however, perplexities not unfrequently lie, from the fact that it is not always easy to separate that inevitableness which runs through human affairs from the results that we, ourselves, produce by our own series of choices and our habitual currents of thought. "A good will has nothing to fear," says Père De Caussade; "it can but fall under that all-powerful hand which guides and sustains it in all its wanderings. It is this divine Hand which draws it toward the goal when it has wandered therefrom, which restores it to the path. The work of the divine action is not in proportion to the capacity of a simple, holy soul, but to her purity of intention; nor does it correspond to the means she adopts, the projects she forms, the counsel she follows. The soul may err in all these, and this not rarely happens; but with a good will and pure intention she can never be misled. When God sees this good disposition He overlooks all the rest, and accepts as done what the soul would assuredly do if circumstances seconded her good will."[Pg 291]

Nevertheless, as things go in this world, the good will may encounter the most peculiarly trying experiences. The most entire and absolute devotion of thought and interest, of love, friendship, regard,—whatever may be,—pouring itself out lavishly, asking nothing but to give of the best the soul conceives, meets the experience of total indifference in return. Had it given coldness instead of ardent regard, selfish scheming instead of infinite and vital interest and absorbing devotion, the result could not be less devoid of response or recognition. Nor is this, perhaps, as life goes, an exceptional experience, though the multiplication of instances does not tend to make any single one less bitter or less tragically sad. Loss is common, but that statistical truth does not make one's own losses less disastrous or less difficult to bear.

Yet, accepting all these experiences that are encountered as absolute facts in life, facts from which there is no appeal, and for which, alas, there is no mitigation, what remains? One may feel as if he would gladly give up the whole business of trying to live at all, but that is not a matter that is optional with the individ[Pg 292]ual. One has to live out his appointed days in this phase of being, and it is only the person of defective intellect as well as defective moral power who will not take the gift of life and make the best—not the worst—of it. Mr. Longfellow's familiar lines,

"Not enjoyment and not sorrow
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us further than to-day,"

have often been pronounced trite, but they contain a vital philosophy. It is not enjoyment, or the reverse, which is the aim; but development. And the culture of the soul lies in these mingled experiences; in the baffled efforts, the devotion that gives itself without return or response,—it lies in the doing and the giving, and not in the receiving. Nor does one fare onward uncompanioned by the friends and helpers unseen, as well as by those in this visible world.

"'Mortal,' they softly say,
'Peace to thy heart!
We, too, yes, mortal,
[Pg 293]Have been as thou art,

Hope-lifted, doubt-depressed,
Seeing in part;
Tried, troubled, tempted,
Sustained as thou art.'"

The spiritual faith and that courage and persistence of energy which is the fruition of faith,—and which are both results of the recognition and acceptance of the great truth so luminously revealed by Bishop Brooks when he says, "Jesus never treated his life as if it were a temporary deposit of the divine life on the earth, cut off and independent of its source; he always treated it as if it lived by its association with the Father's life, on which it rested,"—this faith and courage go forward to complete themselves in exhilaration, in firmness of purpose, and in actual achievement. One finds that he not only gains the strength of that which he overcomes, but that he gains a higher plane of life altogether, a more exalted view and a purer atmosphere by accepting cheerfully and lovingly the discipline of denial and limitation, and using the experience as a stepping-stone, and not as an obstacle to his endeavors. There are three ways of meeting the disappointments[Pg 294] and denials that are—for the most part—somewhat inevitable to every human life: one of sheer despair, of the relinquishing of every effort, and, in the extreme degree of this feeling, resorting to the apparent extinction of life by suicide; the second, of resignation, that is still, however, a hopeless and passive and negative state, in which the man anchors himself to some mere platitudes of submission to the Divine Will, misunderstanding and misinterpreting and misapplying the great and sublime law of obedience and translating it into conditions of spiritual and mental inactivity that are only a degree less degrading than the cowardice and ignorance that rushes into suicide; and the third, of learning the great lesson involved in the disappointment. Submission to the Divine Will is all very well; it is one of the sublimest of the divine laws; but it is not fulfilled by a hopeless and inert evasion of all the duties and demands of life,—it is, instead, in its integrity and its deep significance, fulfilled by the joyful acceptance of the leading, the willing surrender that opens a still wider view and a still more vital faith in the divine wisdom.[Pg 295]

Another way in which denial and defeat and thwarted desires or plans can be met is one still higher and greater, and is that path by which true spiritual advancement is made. This is, not despair and hopelessness because an apparently impassable wall arises across the pathway; not even mere content, and cordial or joyful submission however noble that attitude may be; but there is a loftier state in which the denial can be met; it is not merely an acceptance of God's manifest leading that is so informed with faith that it becomes ceaselessly joyful, but it is to even discern in limitation, in denial, new and sublime opportunities.

One's dearest hopes are suddenly, by circumstances and conditions entirely outside his control, totally cut off. What then? At that moment an entire world of new possibilities opens, and it rests with the man himself to develop these into something far greater than the scope of his former hope or expectation could reveal. He can bring to bear a power of spiritual energy that shall transform the very ill-fortune itself into one transcendently beautiful and even angelic. He can lift all the factors[Pg 296] of his individual problem to the divine plane of love. For love is the spiritual alchemy,—not merely the love for friends and for those near and dear to us; not merely the love for those who are agreeable and winning and whose high qualities inspire it,—but love, love and good will for all. The command to love one's enemies is not an idle nor even an impossible one. The whole law—the whole philosophy, it may be—of life can be read in the counsel, "As ye have therefore opportunity, do good unto all men." Do good,—do the right thing, the kind, the generous thing, regardless of return (for which one usually cares little or not at all), or even of recognition (for which one usually cares a great deal), regardless of the recognition,—let the good be done. Let one, finding himself suddenly confronted by disaster or defeat, resolve: All that has been, every factor and every circumstance that has led up to this moment, shall be for good and never for evil. It shall be for good to each and all and every one involved in it. Even loss or sadness shall be transmuted into gain and joy on a higher than the mere earthly plane. For life "shall be kept open,[Pg 297] that the Father's life may flow through it." Always may one realize the profound truth that "the going down of the walls between our life and our Lord's life, though it consisted of the failure of our dearest theories and the disappointment of our dearest plans,—that, too, could be music to us if through the breach we saw the hope that henceforth our life was to be one with His life, and His was to be ours."

Prayer, in its relation to God and the divine laws; its practical effect upon the immediate events of life, and its power to transform the spiritual self, is one of the great problems of the intellectual and the scientific as well as of the religious life. One day a prayer seems absolutely and undoubtedly answered,—the relation between the prayer and the fulfilment being too direct to admit of classing it under coincidence; and again the purpose that is made a continual supplication perhaps recedes from the realm of the possible to that of the impossible, and the more fervent the entreaty, the more absolute and hopeless seems the denial. By means of which, it may be, one learns a very high spiritual lesson,—that of not desiring any specific event or ful[Pg 298]filment, but of praying, instead, to be kept in harmony with the divine laws, to be enabled to make his life a means of aid and true service to others, and to think as little as possible about any special conditions for himself. "He that loseth his life shall find it," is the affirmation of a very deep philosophy as well as of sacred truth. To entirely emancipate one's mind from thoughts of himself, and to fill it with the inspiration and the sweetness and exhilaration of making his life a quest after every good, and an increasing means for service to humanity, is the only way to find it in the truest and largest sense. So, for the most part, the highest use of prayer is not to ask for the specific gift or event.

In a work entitled "Esoteric Christianity" by Annie Besant there is a chapter on prayer in which we find Mrs. Besant saying:—

"In the invisible world there exist many kinds of Intelligences, which come into relationship with man,—a veritable Jacob's ladder, on which the Angels of God ascend and descend, and above which stands the Lord Himself. Some of these Intelligences are mighty spiritual Powers, others are exceedingly[Pg 299] limited beings, inferior in consciousness to man. This occult side of Nature is a fact recognized by all religions. All the world is filled with living things, invisible to fleshy eyes. The invisible worlds interpenetrate the visible, the crowds of intelligent beings throng round us on every side. Some of these are accessible to human requests and others are amenable to the human will. Christianity recognizes the existence of the higher classes of Intelligences under the general name of angels, and teaches that they are 'ministering spirits;' but what is their ministry, what the nature of their work, what their relationship to human beings?—all that was part of the instruction given in the Lesser Mysteries, as the actual communication with them was enjoyed in the Greater, but in modern days these truths have sunk into the background. For the Protestant the ministry of angels is little more than a phrase."

Mrs. Besant notes that it seems almost impossible for the ordinary student to discover the law according to which a prayer is or is not productive. "And the first thing necessary in seeking to understand this law," she says, "is to analyze prayer itself."[Pg 300] Mrs. Besant classifies prayers as: (1) those which are for definite worldly advantages; (2) those which are for help in moral and intellectual difficulties, and for spiritual growth; and lastly, those which consist in meditation on, and adoration of, the Divine Perfection; and then we find her saying:—

"In addition to all these man is himself a constant creator of invisible beings, for the vibrations of his thoughts and desires create forms of subtle matter, the only life of which is the thought or the desire which ensouls them; he thus creates an army of invisible servants who range through the invisible worlds seeking to do his will. Yet, again, there are in the world human helpers, who work there in their subtle bodies while their physical bodies are sleeping, whose attentive ear may catch a cry for help. And to crown all, there is the ever-present, ever-conscious life of God Himself, potent and responsive at every point of his realm,—that all-pervading, all-embracing, all-sustaining Life of Love, in which we live and move. As naught that can give pleasure or pain can touch the human body without the sensory nerves carrying the message of its impact to the brain centres, so does every vibration in the universe, which is His body, touch the consciousness of God,[Pg 301] and draw thence responsive action. Nerve cells, nerve threads, and muscular fibres may be the agents of feeling and moving, but it is the man who feels and acts; so may myriads of intelligences be the agents, but it is God who knows and answers. Nothing can be so small as not to affect that delicate omnipresent consciousness, nothing so vast as to transcend it."

In the most literal sense we live and move and have our being in the realm of spiritual forces. "Our life is hid with Christ in God." That assertion is no mere mystic phase, but a plain and direct assertion of an absolute spiritual truth. Our real life, all our significant action, is in the invisible realm, and the manifestation in the physical sphere is simply the results and effects of which the processes and causes are all in the ethereal world. Prayer, in all its many and varied phases, is simply activity on the spiritual side, and because of this it is the motor of life. It is the key to that intense form of energy which is the divine life, and its highest development is reached when the soul asks only for one thing,—the one that includes all others,—that of union with God.[Pg 302]

"Anxiety and misgiving," wrote Fénelon, "proceed solely from love of self. The love of God accomplishes all things quietly and completely; it is not anxious or uncertain. The spirit of God rests continually in quietness. Perfect love casteth out fear. It is in forgetfulness of self that we find peace. Happy is he who yields himself completely, unconsciously, and finally to God. Listen to the inward whisper of His Spirit and follow it—that is enough; but to listen one must be silent, and to follow one must yield."

The quiet and perfect obedience to the divine will, taught by Fénelon, has nothing in common with a mere passive and blind acceptance of events as they occur. Obedience to the Heavenly Vision is not in standing still, but in following. It finds its best expression in energy and not in inactivity. The more absolutely one abandons himself to the divine will, the more unceasingly will he fill every hour with effort toward the working out of the higher and the more ideal conditions. An ideal once revealed is meant to be realized. That is the sole reason for its being revealed at all, and the way of life[Pg 303] is to unfalteringly work toward its realization. It is a curious fact that there can be no achievement of life so improbable or so impossible that it cannot be realized by the power—the absolutely invincible power—of mental fidelity. Let one hold his purpose in thought, and the unseen forces thus generated are working for it day and night. Like one of the new inventions in electricity, so thought—a force infinitely more potent than electricity—sets up a certain rate of vibration in the spiritual atmosphere and works as with irresistible sway. The individual who is held to possess great strength of will is, really, simply the one capable of holding the thought, of keeping a certain tenacity of purpose. This power alone redeems one from living on shifting sands, and being perhaps, at last, engulfed and swallowed up in the quicksands of his own shattered visions and ideals, which never grew to fulfilment because of his infirmity of will and his closing his eyes to the star that had shone in his firmament.

The very pain and trial and multiplying obstacles that one may encounter who definitely sets his steps along a certain way, are only helps,[Pg 304] not hindrances. One gains the strength of that which he overcomes. He transforms obstacles into stepping-stones. For we live and move and have our being in an ethereal atmosphere, which is universal, and which unerringly registers every thought and every energy, and transmutes these into living forces. Thought is creative, and if the thought be held with sufficient intensity, it acts upon every element that has to do with the final achievement. Imagination—which is simply clairvoyant vision—discerns the ideal in the dim distance, and thought is the motive force by means of which it is achieved. To be "infirm of will" is, therefore, the greatest of misfortunes, as it inevitably produces complete failure in all the affairs of life. However hopeless a certain combination of events may look, it really is not so. Nothing is ever hopeless, because nothing is final. Conditions are forever flowing like a river, and may be modified and transformed at any moment.

Failure or success is optional with the individual, for each lies in character, and is not a matter of possessions or external conditions. To become cynical, despondent, indifferent, is failure, and one has no moral right to fall to that[Pg 305] level. Associations that induce these feelings should be abandoned. The happy conditions of life are to be had on the same terms. The fretful, the ill-tempered, the selfish, the exacting, must, somewhere and some way, learn their lesson and grow toward the light; but their influence should not be allowed to poison the spiritual atmosphere. It is neither a moral duty, nor is it even true sympathy to share the gloom and depression generated by these qualities. The inward whisper of the Spirit is the summons to a nobler plane on which all the higher powers find their expression. It is a fatal mistake to enter into the dark and unreasoning moods of every unfortunately constituted person. To do this habitually is to so deplete the forces of the spirit that one has nothing left. Let one keep his heart and mind in the currents of the Divine Power; let him actively follow the vision that is revealed to him, and he shall achieve and realize his ideals. It is the law and the prophets. A force as resistless as that of the attraction that holds the stars in their courses will lead him on. "The love of God accomplishes all things quietly and completely."[Pg 306]

The mystic truth that lies enfolded in the words, "Cast thyself into the will of God and thou shalt become as God," is one of marvellous potency. To achieve the state of absolute peace and reconcilement with the Divine will is to achieve poise and power. For to be thus "cast into the will of God" means no mere languid acquiescence or hopeless, despairing acceptance; it means no merely negative and passive state that accepts the will of God for lack of sufficient stamina to assert its own will. But, instead, it means an intelligent recognition of the divine order; it means the will to gain the higher plane of life; it means the glad entering into a new and finer atmosphere charged with the utmost potency, and to become so receptive to it, so much a part of this energy as to command its expression in various forms of activity. The "will of God" is, indeed, the atmosphere of heavenly magnetism; it is liberation, not captivity; it is achievement, not renunciation. People talk about being "resigned" to the will of God; as well might they phrase being "resigned" to Paradise! That has been an inconceivably false tradition that repeated the prayer, "Thy[Pg 307] will be done," as if it were the most sorrowful, instead of the most joyful, petition.

There is another phase of experience into which those of a certain sensitiveness of temperament are apt to fall when encountering the loss or pain that, in one form or another, seems a part of the discipline of the present life; a phase that can only be described as spiritual loneliness and desolation, in which no effort seems possible. It is an experience portrayed in the following stanzas:—

"I see a Spirit by thy side,
Purple-winged and eagle-eyed,
Looking like a heavenly guide.

Though he seems so bright and fair,
Ere thou trust his proffered care,
Pause a little, and beware!

If he bid thee dwell apart,
Tending some ideal smart
In a sick and coward heart;

In self-worship wrapped alone,
Dreaming thy poor griefs are grown
More than other men have known;

Though his words seem true and wise,
Soul, I say to thee, Arise,
He is a Demon in disguise!"
[Pg 308]

It is a phase in which one feels his own peculiar sorrow as the most unendurable of all. Perhaps it is—but one must abandon that point of view. "That way madness lies." His life may be desolate, but he must not allow himself to meditate on that conviction. It is moral as well as mental disaster, and as life is a divine responsibility, not to be evaded because things in general go wrong, one has no right to live in less than his best expression every day and hour. In darkness and desolation, even, one may find a spiritual exaltation. Such a period in life may be like that of the seed, isolated and buried in the ground—that it may germinate and grow; that it may spring up in leaf and flower and fruit, and reach out to life and light with multiplied forces in the transfiguration of new power. A period that seems empty and devoid of stimulus may be, after all, that of highest potency. When nothing crystallizes into events, all the elements are plastic to the impress of spiritual energy. "Cast thyself into the will of God." This is the crucible from which is distilled the alembic of power. One may stamp the image of noblest achievement upon this plastic[Pg 309] period. It is the time in which to create on the spiritual side.

To live in poise, and beauty, and harmony is the finest of all the fine arts. It is, in itself, the occupation of life. "I am primarily engaged to myself," said Emerson, "to be a public servant of the gods; to demonstrate to all men that there is good will and intelligence at the heart of things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings. These are my engagements. If there be power in good intention, in fidelity, and in toil, the north wind shall be purer, the stars in heaven shall glow with a kindlier beam, that I have lived."

It is in the will of God that perfect serenity and joy shall be found. "In His will is our peace," says Dante. The acceptance of this profound truth is the absolute key to all harmony and happiness. When sorrow is felt as a dark cloud, a crushing weight, the energies are paralyzed; but when one can rise above this inertia and cease questioning that which he regards as a mysterious and—in all humility—undeserved calamity; when he can simply accept it as an expression of the divine action that is[Pg 310] moulding the soul, and thus leave it all in peace of spirit; when, forgetting the past, he can press onward to the things that are before,—then, indeed, does he receive of the true ministry of pain.

"Every consecration made in the darkness is reaching out toward the light, and in the end it must come into the light, strong in the strength which it won in its life and struggle in the dark."

There is a great renewal and regeneration of life in the actual realization of Saint Paul's admonition as to forgetting the things that are behind to press onward to those before. One should force himself, simply by an act of will and by his rational convictions of the beauty and value of life, to let go past experiences that chain him to sorrow, and, instead, link himself in that magnetism of spiritual apprehension possible to achieve, to the enchantment and power of the future. Even the most tragic sorrows lose their hold over one if he will reflect that these, as well as his joys, are alike expressions of the divine will. "Seek you," said a devout Catholic priest, "the secret of union with God? There is none other than to avail yourselves of all that[Pg 311] He sends you. You have but to accept all that He sends, and let it do its work in you.... No created mind or heart can teach you what this divine action will do in you; you will learn it by successive experiences. Your life unceasingly flows into this incomprehensible abyss, where we have but to love and accept as best that which the present moment brings, with perfect confidence in this divine action which of itself can only work you good."

When the divine action comes in the guise of joy and happiness, one is swift to give thanks. But when it comes in the guise of pain, shall he not also see in it the expression of God's will, and accept it with that absolute confidence in the wisdom and beneficence of the divine action that is, in itself, peace and sweetness? For it is a "light affliction which is but for a moment," and the promise is ours that it "worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." And this is not merely nor mostly a religious enthusiasm; it is the only practical working basis on which one whom experiences touch deeply can live at all. Without this philosophy sorrow would undermine the health[Pg 312] and paralyze all the energy that should express itself in achievements. But the secret of joy is hidden in pain.

"For what God deigns to try with sorrow
He means not to decay to-morrow;
But through that fiery trial last
When earthly ties and bonds are past."

An experience that receives this test must hold deep significance. Let one accept it,—not only with patience and trust, but triumphantly, radiantly, as in the exquisite realization of the divine words: "For ye have need of patience, that after ye have done the will of God, ye shall receive the promise." And the promise is sure if the conditions have been fulfilled. It is only a question of time. Even heaven itself is but "the perfect sight of Christ," and why shall not this radiant vision flash upon us, now and here in the earthly life, and make heaven of every day? It is not merely by the change called death that we enter into the spiritual world. The turn of thought, the thrill of love and sacrifice and generous outgoing, carries one, at any instant, into the heavenly life. It is only the qualities that find there their native atmosphere which give[Pg 313] beauty, depth, and significance to this human life. It is only as one lives divinely that he lives at all,—only as one recognizes "the perfect sight of the Christ" that he recognizes the full scope of his responsibility and enters on his truest experiences.

Matthew Arnold dwells often upon "our need for conduct, our need for beauty;" and he finds the springs of the supply to be, not in the "strenuous" life, always at high pressure and extreme tension, but in the thoughtful leisure, in the serenity of repose, in the devotion to poetry and art. "How," he questions, "are poetry and eloquence to exercise the power of relating the modern results of natural science to man's instinct for conduct, his instinct for beauty? And here again I answer that I do not know how they will exercise it, but that they can and will exercise it I am sure. I do not mean that modern philosophical poets and modern philosophical moralists are to come and relate for us, in express terms, the results of modern scientific research to our instinct for conduct, our instinct for beauty. But I mean that[Pg 314] we shall find, as a matter of experience, if we know the best that has been thought and uttered in the world, we shall find that the art and poetry and eloquence of men who lived, perhaps, long ago, who had the most limited natural knowledge, who had the most erroneous conceptions about many important matters,—we shall find that this art, and poetry, and eloquence, have, in fact, not only the power of refreshing and delighting us, they have also the power,—such is the strength and worth, in essentials, of their author's criticism of life,—they have a fortifying, and elevating, and quickening, and suggestive power, capable of wonderfully helping us to relate the results of modern science to our need for conduct, our need for beauty."

Life has a tendency to become far too "strenuous" with the best one can do, even; and the need is not for greater pressure of intensity, but for greater receptivity of intellectual and spiritual refreshment; for a calmer trust and a loftier faith.

The joy of faith in its inspiration and emotion is wonderfully renewed from the Divine Word. "The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light,[Pg 315] and thy God thy glory." The gospels are full of these positive and radiant assurances that invest faith with the most absolute joy of confidence and positiveness of trust. These assurances meet the eye and enter the heart with the certainty of a personal message, directly given from God. And it is in this realm of the higher thought, of that culture of the soul which is the true object and aim of the temporary life on earth, that the relief from the too strenuous pressure of affairs must be found. The human soul is so constituted that it cannot live unless it breathes its native air of inspiration and joy and divineness. It is stifled in the "strenuous" lower life, its energies are paralyzed unless it seek renewal at the divine springs. It is this strenuousness of latter-day life, unrelieved by love and by prayer; unrelieved by the spiritual luxury of loving service and outgoing thought; this strenuous attitude, intent on getting and greed and gain and personal advantage, that, at last, ends in the discords and the crimes, the despair and the suicides, whose records fill the daily press. The cure for all these ills is to be found only in the higher life of conduct and of beauty. "Thou shalt show me the way of[Pg 316] life: Thou shalt make me full of joy with Thy countenance." Here, and here alone, is the cure, the relief, the leading into peace and serenity and exaltation. It is not that the "fierce energy" of life is in excess, but that its application is in wrong and unmeaning directions. Let the soul find its true refreshment and infinitely sustaining tide of energy in God, and immediately "old things have passed away," and "all have become new," and life is full of exhilaration and joy. "Every day we ought to renew our purpose, saying to ourselves: This day let us make a sound beginning, for what we have hitherto done is naught." Every day is a new and definite re-entrance upon life. Nor is it worth while to linger too much on the mistakes, the errors of yesterday. True, the consequences of errors and mistakes linger in life until they are worked out; but the working out is, after all, only a question of time and of unfaltering persistence in the upward way, and thus a new foundation of life is laid: "old things have passed away and all things have become new." It is in the serene and joyous exaltation of life alone that one truly lives; in that sweetness of mutual trust and generous[Pg 317] aims and over-flowing love that radiates its joy and beauty to all with whom it comes in contact, and which is perpetually fed and perpetually renewed by the constant communion of the soul with God.

On the New Year's eve of 1902 there was a wonderful phenomenon transpiring in the stellar universe, which continued during several weeks. That night was one of the utmost beauty. The air was as clear as crystal, and the constellation of Orion gleamed and sparkled like a colossal group of diamonds against an azure background. The entire sky was a scene of unparalleled grandeur and magnificence. The superb constellations of Orion and Ursa Major (familiarly known as the "Dipper") blazed with an intense brilliancy that seemed the very incarnation and concentration of electric vitality. Five of the stars in Ursa Major were then receding from our atmosphere at the rate of twenty thousand miles a second; the other two were approaching; and the phenomenon of these weeks was in the changing aspect of that constellation which the astronomers hold will require some two thousand years to complete. Then will[Pg 318] Ursa Major, as seen from the earth, be entirely changed. Such facts as these, and the speculation they suggest, offer to us a new basis for the contemplation of life. If it require a period of two thousand years to produce the appreciable change of grouping in a constellation whose stars are moving at the rate of twenty thousand miles a second, this fact indicates to us the infinite spaces and the unlimited time in which the universe moves onward in its appointed path.

With the individual life, as with the star,—it is the direction in which it is moving that determines the results. In this truth lies infinite encouragement. Let one set his feet in the upward way, and keep steadfastly to his aim; let him keep unfaltering faith with his ideals,—and his success in whatever direction he is moving, his ultimate achievement of every aim he follows, is assured. It becomes simply a question of time when the entire aspect of his life shall be changed even as that of constellations in their appointed course.

It is in this manner alone that one may control his life,—not by the working of an instantaneous[Pg 319] miracle, but by absolute fidelity to a definite ideal of progressive change.

"Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither,
Your schemes, politics, fail, lines give way, substances mock and
elude me,
Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-poss'd soul, eludes not,
One's self must never give way—that is the final substance—that out
of all is sure,
Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains?
When shows break up what but one's self is sure?"

The "quicksand years" whirl away many things. Schemes dissolve and vanish; new combinations constantly arise; every day is, indeed, a new beginning, and

But a purpose that remains unchanged amid all the shifting scenery of perpetual new environments must eventually fulfil itself. The stars in their courses fight for it. The celestial laws insure its final goal.

"Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains?
When shows break up, what but one's self is sure?"
[Pg 320]

One has this sure self only in proportion as he relates his life to the divine life. The only permanence is to be found in the currents of divine energy, infinite and exhaustless.

There are many ways of watching the New Year in; but the somewhat unique personal experience of welcoming it on that eve of 1902, gazing at the vast expanse of the brilliant skies through the windows of a sleeping-car, had its claim to beauty and sacredness. The rush of the train gave a sense of almost floating out into the ethereal spaces. There was a detachment from earth that hardly comes even in the sacred service of the church on that mystic midnight of a New Year. One seemed alone with the infinite Powers, and a new and deeper trust in the Giver of all Good was inspired. The beautiful lines of Whittier came to memory:—

"I know not what the future hath
Of marvel and surprise,
Assured alone that life and death
His mercy underlies."

Thus might one remember and dream while flying on under the New Year's skies, and realize anew that any trend of thought is inevitably[Pg 321] creating its future. Auto-suggestion is the most potent of forces, and the assertion that "as a man thinketh so is he," is literally true. As he thinketh, so he shall be, also; and he can thus think himself into new conditions and attract to himself new forces. He has the power to keep his feet set in this upward pathway, and so sure as is the destiny of the stars and the constellations on their course through the heavenly spaces, so sure is his own arrival at the point toward which he is moving, and his achievement of the supreme end he holds steadfastly in view. Thus life will be to him no period of mere "quicksand years," but, instead, a series of advancing realization and beautiful states. Ideals may be swiftly realized by the accelerated energy of concentration and prayer, and the secret of transformation from defeat and denial to the perfect hour of triumph and happiness lies, for each one, within his own keeping.

"Do we not all wish that we could live our lives over again in the light of[Pg 322] our present experience?" remarked Rev. Doctor Charles Gordon Ames; "but this is just what God lets us do."

Here, in a word, was that divine panorama of the completeness of life revealed; the part of it lived in this present phase of experience being infinitely less in its relation, compared to the whole, than is one day in its relation to the longest life possible on earth. One day out of seventy, eighty, ninety years, would not seem so much; yet this entire period of even the longest life on earth, in its relative proportion to the life of all the eternities, is far less than is one day out of a lifetime in its proportional relation to Immortality. This spiritual panorama suggests its infinite energy of hope; it reinforces courage; it reveals in the most impressive manner the significance of living. For it is the tendency which always determines the result.

There can hardly be a question but that distrust of conditions is a fatal element in all effort and achievement. Depression might, indeed, well take its place among the seven deadly sins that Dante names. There are serious errors whose effect is less disastrous than is that of[Pg 323] habitual depression of spirits. Mental power is one's working capital, and the degree of power depends, absolutely, on the quality of thought, or, as the phrase goes, on "the state of mind." Conditions determine events, but conditions are plastic to thought. On them one may stamp the impress. If he persist in regarding himself as a victim to fate and his life as a sacrifice and burnt offering, he can very soon work this conception into actuality. He can—indeed he will, and he inevitably must—become that which he continually sees himself, in mental vision. But if he will take his stand, with poise and serenity, on spiritual truth; if he will amend his life according to spiritual laws; if he will accept failure as merely a stepping-stone to ultimate success,—as "the triumph's evidence,"—ill fortune can establish no dominant power over his life. That things have gone wrong is only, after all, a proof that they may go right. The consequences of error or mistake warn one not to make the same error or mistake again; and therefore the consequences, however unpleasant or sad at the moment, are really educative in their nature, and their very trial or pain becomes, if[Pg 324] truly recognized, a friendly and redemptive power. Then, too, time is a variable factor. It is degree, not duration, that it means. The consequences of an error may be accepted and annulled swiftly. Intensity of feeling will condense a year, an eternity, even, into an hour. And the "new day," days in which, as Doctor Ames so charmingly wrote,—

"—God sets for you
A fair clean page to write anew
The lesson blotted hitherto,"—

a new day may be a new lifetime as well as that "next life" beyond the change we call death.

How wonderfully Emerson unfolds the magic possible to a day. "One of the illusions," he says, "is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday. There are days which are the carnival of the year. The angels assume flesh, and repeatedly become visible. The imagination of the gods is excited, and rushes on every side into forms. Yesterday not a bird peeped; the world was barren, peaked, and pin[Pg 325]ing: to-day 't is inconceivably populous; creation swarms and meliorates."

The speculative idea that immortality is an achievement rather than a gift is not new, but whenever it is formulated, as in a recent sermon by Rev. Doctor Parkhurst, it startles many people and arouses antagonism, so far as it is not truly understood. Yet it has its deepest aspects of spiritual truth, and it is the idea constantly, persistently, and most impressively taught by Saint Paul throughout the entire gospels. We are constantly besought to lay hold on the eternal life; to press forward toward immortal things; to be renewed in the spirit; to "put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness; to follow Him, who is the Life, the Truth, the Way." The entire teaching of the gospels is one forcible system of active and unfaltering endeavor in the growing achievement of spirituality, which determines Immortality. It is the exact accountant—measure for measure. So much spirituality, so much immortality. Nor does this assertion partake in the slightest degree of the nature of a metaphysical problem, to be comprehended only[Pg 326] by the theologian and the philosopher. It is the most simple, clear, and direct of propositions. We all accept Saint Paul's assertion that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven. So far as one lives only in the processes of the physical life he is not living the life of those spiritual energies which alone lay hold on immortality. There is a certain degree of intelligent consciousness that is inseparable from this physical life; an intelligence that buys and sells, and bargains and calculates on the physical plane, and is sufficient to produce a certain rational status of life. There are not wanting individuals who never rise above this plane. They may, and often do, acquire possessions and even power on the limited plane of the outward life; they may even have some formal and ceremonial religious observances which they mistake for Christianity, but which are the framework ready and able to inspire them if filled with the spirit, but which, to them, remain empty and dead. The man whose body, simply, occupies his church pew on Sunday, and who on Monday proceeds to cheat his neighbor, is not, we will all agree, the man who has really entered into[Pg 327] the true privileges offered by the Church. The sacrament of Sunday must become the consecration of Monday. Unless this be true the man has not laid hold on Immortality. So we see that this lower plane of considerable intelligence and consciousness, related exclusively to the visible and the tangible, must be eliminated from our conceptions of Immortality. There is nothing at all in this that can possibly survive death. Doctor John Fiske gives a fine and comprehensive definition of that degree of achievement which is above the level of death when he says:—

"In the highest of creatures the Divine immanence has acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the dissolution of the flesh, and assert an individuality untrammelled by the limitations which in the present life everywhere persistently surround it."

Here we have the initial truth. The acquirement of "sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the dissolution of the flesh,"—and "to assert an individuality untrammelled by the limitations of the present life,"—when man has[Pg 328] progressed so far as this, then, and then alone, has he achieved immortality. He has laid hold on its initial phase. For immortality is infinite beyond conception. It is as infinite as space, and as the idea of God. To have achieved enough of this "concentration and steadiness"—which is merely another phrase for spirituality—to survive death, is no more achieving immortality, in its wholeness and completeness, than learning the alphabet is the achievement of scholarship in its infinite resources. It cannot be conceived of as complete, but, instead, as an endless chain of infinite possibilities, of ever new and ever widening vistas.

One of the noblest men and loftiest thinkers of the day, referring, in a private letter, to this sermon of Doctor Parkhurst that inspired such wide discussion, thus wrote:—

"That paragraph from Doctor Parkhurst expresses my idea regarding immortality. There must be a master (good) thought or passion. It is the angel with wings that wafts the soul where the man most longed to be in life,—with the purest and best. 'As one thinks, so he shall be,' is sound doctrine. All this embodies what I once read of Sappho, who[Pg 329] counselled her pupils to cultivate their thoughts and grow, or they would have nothing to carry with them, nothing to make a soul of, nothing to survive the grave.

"I believe that on this idea rests the scheme of life through faith in Christ. As He is the highest, the ideal, the supreme, the soul finds rest in Him, and there grows into a life that death cannot annihilate. In the presence of the great master passion, with the soul thrilling with nobleness, as when dying for another, burned at the stake for righteousness' sake, the spirit goes straight to God, into the infinite bosom, an angel fit for only heaven.

"If the soul hungers and thirsts for God it will reach him. If, at the last moment, a man's whole nature cries longingly in faith to Christ,—that will save him, waft him, draw him into the divine abode. And this explains the Christian plan of so-called salvation. Faith in Christ is the master passion, and love the magnet that draws the soul to its own kind. It may be set down as true that vice and sin have no vitality. Wickedness is death. Virtue and love of God are life."

But the question recurs just here, Is there absolutely no possibility of immortality for him who does not advance beyond a certain conscious[Pg 330] and partly automatic intelligence on the physical plane? Does the gate of possibilities, does the door of opportunity close with this brief mortal life? To that question science as well as faith answers "no." The law of Evolution is the law of eternal possibility and opportunity. The spark of immortality—the divine spark, implanted by God, when he made man in His image,—this is eternal in its nature, and unquestionably survives death. But immortality is the result of man's co-operation with the Divine. God has implanted the spark. He has placed man in an environment of discipline and of opportunity. The individual may be whatever he, himself, decides and chooses to be. Not all in an hour, or in a year; not, perhaps, even in this entire lifetime; but sometime and somewhere he who is unfaltering in his allegiance to his ideal shall realize it at last. And the degree of immediateness and celerity with which he realizes it depends entirely on the degree of spiritual energy that he brings to bear on his purpose. The higher the potency, the swifter the result.

Science as well as ethics recognizes the reality of the unseen potencies. Science is, indeed, pointing the way. "The influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter," says Professor William James, "is a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of electro-magnetism," and he adds:—

"The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as an ideal impulse originates in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing it in a way for which we cannot otherwise account); we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in the world. When we commune with it, work is absolutely done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative[Pg 332] change. But that which produces effects in another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal."

Not unreal. On the contrary, the unseen is the realm of that which is alone real and abiding. The positiveness of the divine life is a quality that has too little recognition from the world of philosophy and speculation. It is an infinite reservoir of infinite energy, from which may be drawn at any moment, peace, courage, and power. "Man can learn to transcend the limitations of finite thought at will. The Divine Presence is known through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of consciousness. It is not a vague twilight, or semi-conscious experience. It is not an ecstasy. It is not a trance. It is not super-consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not due to self-hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound, rational, common-sense shifting of consciousness from the phenomena of sense perception to the phenomena of seer-ship, from the thought of self to a distinctively higher realm. For example, if the lower self be nervous, anx[Pg 333]ious, tense, one can in a few moments compel it to be calm. This is not done by a word simply. Nor is it done by hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of peace as definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The power can be as surely used as the sun's rays can be focussed and made to do work, to set fire to wood."

In these words there is very clearly set forth a certain spiritual achievement of a definite nature. It is simply the act of liberating the spiritual self from entanglement with the lower self,—the summoning into ascendency of the higher powers. This intense degree of spiritual energy may be achieved with the force and suddenness of a special creation.

The physical universe in which man finds himself is not only surrounded by the spiritual universe, but the two are so absolutely interpenetrated that he may live in both, and, as a matter of fact, whoever lives the life of the spirit does live now and here, as an inhabitant of both these realms. The spiritual universe is the reservoir of energy. "The things that are seen are temporal, but those that are unseen are eternal,"[Pg 334] and faith, as the substance of those things not seen, is a definite potency which is practically related to daily affairs. That is to say, it is an absolute power, by means of which one can fulfil the practical duties of every day. The degree of one's ability to draw from this energy and assimilate it into his life measures his degree of success.

Doctor Ostwald, a German scientist, claims that in energy he has discovered the actual bridge, the missing link, between mind and matter, between the spiritual and the physical worlds; that it is a bridge "which covers the chasm between force and substance," and "which is of a nature sufficiently manifest to embrace the totality of our experiences, the interior as well as the exterior." Doctor Ostwald claims that there is an immaterial factor, one endowed with neither weight nor mass, which in a quantitative way is just as unchangeable as the mass and weight of material substances, and which, exactly like these, can undergo qualitative transformations of all kinds. He holds that energy may be converted from every one of its forms into every other, and its power of transformation is there[Pg 335]fore unlimited, and that every change which takes place in the outer world, and every process, may be described by a statement of the kind and amount of energy that has undergone conversion.

This conception of energy is a very clear and remarkable one, placing it as the infinite power from which any form of force, spiritual or mechanical, can be derived.

In the moral universe the true expression of this energy upon which one may draw infinitely lies in service. It is in so enlarging the personal sphere of life as to include the widest possible range of sympathy and comprehension. The mystic spirit is full of value in reaching out into the realm of spiritual forces, but when these forces are gained they must be applied. The old religious idea used to include a great deal of discussion about saving the soul; but the larger spiritual enlightenment of to-day sees that the phrase "saving the soul" implies a present condition,—the state of love, sympathy, service, by which the soul is saved to-day, and not a vague condition to be only realized in some remote eternity. Now is the day of salvation. The[Pg 336] success of life lies not in possessions; it lies in keeping the harmonious and perfectly receptive relation with the spiritual realm of forces, and using these forces in every duty and need and opportunity that presents itself. As for always compassing desires, or achieving the possession of this thing or that, is in reality immaterial. The best things in life are often the things one does not have; but they produce effects in the visible world, and often, just in proportion as the things themselves remain in the ethereal realm, is the potency of the effects they produce in the physical realm. This other dimension of existence is one with which the final reckoning must be made. It is no longer length of days, but intensity of energy, that determines results. Not length of time, but intensity of purpose, energy of action,—in these lie the secret of achievement. The power that lies in brief moments is the power required for effective life and work. Emerson truly says that we talk of the shortness of life, but that life is unnecessarily long. Degree and not duration is the test of power in any work, and the application of this truth to the ordinary affairs of life[Pg 337] would render it possible to have every day hold in itself the value of a week or a month as usually estimated. The entire trend of progress is toward that intensity of creative energy that fairly speaks things into being. A business man has now on his desk a long-distance telephone, connecting him with far-away cities; he answers his letters by speaking into the phonograph; his typewriting clerk copies them from this, and an hour of his morning represents as much accomplishment as by the old and slower methods would have required days; and thus time is constantly made more valuable.

The discoveries in nature are in a perfect correspondence with the advancing requirements of human life.

The deeper researches of science are revealing the absolute unity of the entire universe. The earth and the most remote stars are composed of the same matter. The wonderful discovery of spectrum analysis by Kirchoff and Bunsen in 1861 has shown that the whole stellar universe is made up of the same chemical materials as those with which we are familiar upon the earth. A part of the dazzling brilliance of the noonday[Pg 338] sun is due to the vapor of iron floating in his atmosphere, and the faint luminosity of the remotest cloudlike nebula is the glow of just such hydrogen as enters into every drop of water that we drink....

"... The generalization of the metamorphosis of forces, which was begun a century ago by Count Rumford when he recognized heat as a mode of molecular motion, was consummated about the middle of the century, when Doctor Joule showed mathematically just how much heat is equivalent to just how much visible motion, and when the researches of Helmholtz, Mayer, and Faraday completed the grand demonstration that light and heat and magnetism and electricity and visible motion are all interchangeable one into the other, and are continually thus interchanging from moment to moment."

It is not a far cry from these scientific data to the recognition that force, in all its various forms of manifestation, proceeds from the same energy, and that the curious manifestation of it in radium is explained by the possibility that this substance is merely a remarkable conductor[Pg 339] of this intense energy in the ether. The human organism may make itself increasingly a conductor and transmitter of this energy, and the secret of coming into perfectly harmonious relations with this energy is the secret of all achievement. "Life is a search after power," says Emerson, "and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,—there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,—that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.... All power," he adds, "is of one kind; a sharing of the nature of the world."

With his characteristically marvellous insight, Emerson has, in this paragraph, recognized the truth that, in these latter days, is a matter of absolute scientific discovery.

The "life that now is and that which is to come" are no more definitely separable than are the periods of childhood and youth, or youth and manhood. The advance is by evolutionary progress, with no sudden, or visible, change from day to day. The life that now is creates and determines the life that is to come. A man is what he is to-day because of the life he lived yesterday, and last year, and a decade, or several[Pg 340] decades, ago. That which we call life—environment, circumstances, conditions—is the sum of the expression of all its past experiences, thought, aspirations, energy, or the lack of thought, aspirations, and energy. One's life is in his own hands; it is subject to his own will power, to his own energy of aspiration. He must aspire and go forward or he will degenerate. There is no possibility of an epoch that is stationary. Both in any form of work or art, as well as in mental and spiritual life, one must constantly go forward, or he will find himself going backward. Even a pianist as great as Paderewski must keep his fingers in practice on the keyboard every day. The painter cannot long absent himself from his canvas without losing in his art. The thinker, the student, must be forever conquering new realms.

Science is demonstrating the actual existence of another world, transcending, pervading, surrounding this one; a world which interpenetrates our own,—the ethereal in the atmospheric,—and there is one part of the personality of man that dwells continually on this ethereal side. The physical body only conveys a partial[Pg 341] expression of the entire being. The spiritual self lived long before it tenanted this present body, and it will continue to live after it has discarded this body. The life that is constantly proceeds to create the life that is to come.

In this ethereal world,—which interpenetrates our atmosphere and in which the higher part of man's being continually dwells,—there are stored the finer forces which humanity is now discovering and learning to use. In this realm spirit speaks to spirit, telepathically. The power to thus communicate is an attribute of the spirit, and, whether in or out of the body, does not seem to affect the power. In this ethereal realm are the currents that make possible wireless telegraphy. The grouping and combination of these finer and more intense potencies result in great inventions. This realm is, in short, the miracle world; but a miracle is not something outside the laws of nature. Indeed, as Phillips Brooks truly said, "A miracle is an essential part of the plan of God." It is simply an occurrence under the higher laws, and on a higher plane. The great truths of spiritual life are pouring themselves out to this age with[Pg 342] larger revelations of God. They teach the deepening necessity for constant love, for larger service, for a more complete consecration to the Divine life that may contribute more and more of usefulness to the human life. To achieve that "closer walk with God" that alone gives power, one must constantly seek larger fields of effort and endeavor, and bring himself face to face with great problems.

To live the higher life, the life of the spirit, is not to seek cloistered seclusion, but to enter into all the great opportunities, the difficulties, the privileges, or the penalties, that attend every real endeavor. In this, alone, does one find the life more abundant. In this, alone, lies the secret of making noble the life that now is and glorifying that which is to come.

The profound significance, and the illumination brought to the problem of living by simply giving one's self entirely, with belief, and love, and joy, to the will of God, is an experience that transcends human language. Too often has the acceptance of God's will been held to be a spirit of the abandonment of despair, or of the mere inertia that ceases from striving and from aspi[Pg 343]ration. On the contrary, it is the most intense form of action. It embodies the loftiest aspiration. It compels the highest degree of energy. It calls into play every intellectual faculty; it arouses and inspires. It is the regeneration of the individual. He does not know what life is; he does not even begin to live, at all, in any sense worth the name, until he lives and moves and has his being in the will of God. It is, indeed, as Professor Carl Hilty has said, a sense of initiative and power. "What is the happy life?" questions Professor Hilty. "It is a life of conscious harmony with the Divine order of the world, a sense, that is to say, of God's companionship.... The better world we enter is, indeed, entered by faith and not by sight; but this faith grows more confident and more supporting, until it is like an inward faculty of life itself. To substitute for this a world of the outward senses is to find no meaning in life which can convey confidence. Faith in God," continues Professor Hilty, "is a form of experience, not a form of proof.... Here then, is the first step toward the discovery of the meaning of life. It is an act of will, a moral[Pg 344] venture, a listening to experience. No man can omit this initial step, and no man can teach another the lesson which lies in his own experience. The prophets of the Old Testament found an accurate expression for this act of will when they described it as a 'turning,' and they went on to assure their people of the perfect inward peace and the sense of confidence which followed this act. 'Look unto me and be ye saved,' says Isaiah; 'Incline your ear and come unto me; hear, and your soul shall live.' From that time to this, thousands of those who have thus changed the direction of their wills have entered into the same sense of peace; while no man who has thus given his will to God has ever felt himself permanently bewildered or forsaken.

"Here, also, in this free act of the will is attained that sense of liberty which is described as righteousness. It is a sense of initiative and power, as though one were not wholly the subject of arbitrary grace, but had a certain positive companionship with God.... This step once taken both the world in which one lives and one's own personal life get a clear and intelligible meaning."[Pg 345]

Ignorance and blindness may "try all other ways," and they prove unavailing. There is no success, there is no happiness, there is no progress, until there is the clear inner recognition and the profound and loving and joyful acceptance of the Divine will; of coming into such perfect acceptance of it as to make one's own will identified with its harmony.

Thus, when Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," He simply expressed a fact that cannot be negatived nor ignored. It is an actual, a positive law, as impossible to evade as the law of gravitation. One may refuse "the way, the truth, and the life," and wander in bewilderment and inaction; but he will never be able to achieve worthy work, or personal peace, until he accepts and lives by this law. As Professor Hilty so well says, this, alone, gives life an intelligent meaning. "As one follows the way, he gains, first of all, courage, so that he dares to go on in his search. He goes[Pg 346] still further, and the way opens into the assurance that life, with all its mystery, is not lived in vain. He pushes on, and the way issues into health, not only of the soul, but even of the body; for bodily health is more dependent on spiritual condition than spiritual condition is on bodily health; and modern medicine can never restore and assure health to the body if it limit its problem to physical relief alone. Nor is even this the end of the 'way' of Christ. Here alone is positive social redemption.... Finally, the way is sure to lead every life which follows it, and is willing to pay the price for the possession of truth, into the region of spiritual peace."

Thus, in the end, "out of the midst of evil, issues at last the mastery of the good." Thus moral progress itself is the witness of God.

Living by this faith, life becomes strong, serene, and radiant. "The Magi have but to follow their Star in peace.... The Divine action marvellously adjusts all things. The order of God sends each moment the appropriate instrument for its work; and the soul, enlightened by faith, finds all things good, desiring neither more nor less than she possesses."[Pg 347]

One of the great discourses of Phillips Brooks had for its theme the lesson of not laying too much stress on the recognition of one's motives or on any return of sympathetic consideration. "Let me not think," said Doctor Brooks, "that I get nothing from the man who misunderstands all my attempts to serve him, and who scorns me when I know that I deserve his sympathy. Ah! it would be sad enough if only the men who understood us and were grateful to us when we gave ourselves to them had help to give us in return. The good reformer whom you try to help in his reform, and who turns off from you contemptuously because he distrusts you, seeing that your ways are different from his, he does not make you happy,—he makes you unhappy; but he makes you good, he leads you to a truer insight, a more profound unselfishness. And so (it is the old lesson), not until goodness becomes the one thing that you desire, not until you gauge all growth and gain by that, not until then can you really know that the law has worked, the promise has been fulfilled. With what measure you gave yourself to him, he has given himself—the heart of himself,[Pg 348]—which is not his favor, not his love, but his goodness, the real heart of himself to you. For the rest you can easily wait until you both come to the better world, where misconceptions shall have passed away, and the outward forms and envelopes of things shall correspond perfectly with their inner substances forever."

For this alone is the Life Radiant. It may not be ease or pleasure, but it is that ceaseless joy of the soul that may be the daily experience of every human being. And to gain the deep inner conviction of this sublime truth is worth what[Pg 349]ever it may cost of tears or trial. It is the threshold of joy. It is the initiation into a higher spiritual state which one may gain in his progress while on earth as well as in heaven. In fact, no one is really fitted for the highest privileges and sweetness he may crave until he has learned to live well, to live joyfully, without them. No one is fitted for joy until he can live well without joy. It is the law and the prophets.

One may tread,—not the "whole round of creation," as Browning phrases it, but a minor segment of it, at least, and come back with added and more profound conviction that happiness is a condition of the spirit; that "the soul is ceaselessly joyful;" that the incidents and accidents of the outward life cannot mar nor lessen that sense of higher peace and joy and harmony which is the atmosphere of any true spiritual life. One may recognize and affirm this truth by spiritual intuition, and he may then be led through many phases of actual tests in actual life; he may for a time lose his hold on it and come to say that happiness is a thing that depends on so many causes outside one's own control; that illness, death, loss of friends, adverse[Pg 350] circumstances, failures and trials of all kinds, may come into his experience, and that one is at the mercy of all these vicissitudes. Can the individual be happy, he will ask, when all that made happiness is taken away? Can he be happy if he has lost all his worldly goods? or if death has taken those nearest and dearest to him? or if the separations of life, far harder to bear than those of death, have come to him? And yet, until he has learned to answer these questions with the most triumphant affirmative, he has not learned the measure nor sounded the depth of a true and noble order of Happiness. The difference is that of being safely on board a great steamer when wind and wave are tempest-tossed, or of being helpless in the raging waters. The storm may be precisely the same; the tempest may rage as it will, but safe and secure in the cabin or stateroom, the voyager does not mind its fury. And truly may this analogy be held in life. It is possible to emerge from the winds and waves; to enter so entirely into the sense of security in the Divine; to hold so absolutely the faith in the Divine leading, that even in the midst of trial and loss and deprivation[Pg 351] and sorrow, one shall come to know, through his own experience, that "the soul is ceaselessly joyful." For it is one thing to accept a truth theoretically, or believe it intuitively, and another to prove it through experience that shall test the quality of faith and conviction. Learning this supreme truth of life through outward experiences as well as through inner revelation is a victory of the will that may even make itself an epoch, a landmark, in spiritual progress.

It is the complete recognition of that invincible aid given to the soul through the "ever-present" aid of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.

"Jesus, the Christ, this one perfect character, has come into the world and lived in it; filling all the moulds of action, all the terms of duty, and love, with His own divine manners, works, and charities," wrote Doctor Horace Bushnell. "All the conditions of our life are raised thus by the meaning He has shown to be in them and the grace He has put upon them. The world itself is changed and is no more the same that it was; it has never been the same since Jesus left it. The air is charged with heavenly odors, and a kind of celestial consciousness, a sense of other[Pg 352] worlds, is wafted on us in its breath. It were easier to untwist all the beams of light in the sky, separating and expunging one of the colors, than to get the character of Jesus, which is the real gospel, out of the world."

The one deepest need of the world to-day; the one deepest need of each individual, is the more actual realization of the personality of Christ. The perspective of nineteen hundred years only brings more vividly before the mind, more close to the spiritual apprehension, the personal holiness of Jesus, and enforces the truth that shall redeem humanity,—the practical possibility of the increasing achievement of this personal holiness for every man and woman. "Because I live ye shall live also," He said. But what is it to live? Certainly, something far above and beyond mere existence. Life, in its true sense, is to know God. This is the life eternal. No one can "know God" save in just the degree to which he lives God's life,—the divine life,—and in the degree to which he is living the divine life does he live the life eternal. The life eternal may be lived to-day as well as after death, in some vague eternity. The life eternal is simply the[Pg 353] life of spiritual qualities. It is the life in which truth, honor, integrity, sacrifice, patience, and love abound, and in which all that is selfish and false is cast out. Now, however exalted a definition of the present, daily life this may seem to be, it is in no sense an impossible one. The more exalted is one's standard for the perpetual quality of his life, the more stimulating it becomes. The exalted ideal inspires; the low standard depresses. An invincible energy sweeps instantly through the atmosphere to sustain him who allies himself with his noblest ideals. A force that disintegrates and baffles sweeps down upon him who abandons his nobler ideals, and substitutes for them the mere selfish, the commonplace, or the base. The "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve" is no merely abstract phrase or trick of rhetoric. Every hour is an hour of destiny. Every hour is an hour of choice. Legions of angels are in the unseen world surrounding humanity. Not one thought, one aspiration, one prayer, is unheard and unnoted. No conditions or circumstances are sordid or material unless he whom they invest make them so by sordid and material thought; by turning away from that life[Pg 354] of the spirit whose very reality is made and is tested by these circumstances. "All the conditions of life are raised," says Doctor Bushnell, in the extract quoted above, "by the meaning He has shown to be in them, and the grace He has put upon them." Might not one, with profit, dwell for a moment upon this statement?

There is a current sweeping through latter-day life and reflecting itself largely in miscellaneous literature, to the effect that what the writers are pleased to call "success in life" is achieved by self-reliance; that a man must believe in himself; and the final triumph is illustrated as that of the man who begins as an errand boy at two dollars a week and ends as a multi-millionaire. Between these two points in space the arc of success subtends, according to this order of literature, and the word is: make a million, or a hundred millions of dollars,—honestly if you can, dishonestly if you must, but, at all events, the point is to "arrive." Now there is both a most demoralizing fallacy and a strong and valuable truth mixed up in these exhortations. "Trust thyself," said Emerson; "every heart vibrates to that iron string."[Pg 355]

And Emerson and Henley are right—so far as they go. And the man who has been industrious, and economical, and has accumulated a fortune, has, at all times, some elements that are right; and rigid economy is far better than selfish indulgence. But whether a rigid economy is always a virtue—depends. "There is that scattereth, yet increaseth." Whether it is nobler to increase one's bank account at the expense of all the personal expansion of life, through study, social life, travel,—all that makes up a choice and fine culture, and at the expense of depriving one's self of the untold luxury of service, as needs come in view,—is certainly an open question, and one in which there is a good deal to say for other uses of money than that of establishing an impressive bank account; but leaving this aspect of the problem, one returns to that[Pg 356] phase of it represented by self-reliance. It is a great hindrance to the infinite development of man to conceive of courage and self-reliance as capacities or powers of his own rather than as fed from the divine energy. A stream might as well cut itself off from its source, and from its tributaries, and expect to flow on, in undiminished current to the sea, as for man to regard courage and force of will as generated in himself. Thus he dwarfs and hinders all his spiritual powers that are found to lay hold upon God. Thus he stifles himself, rather than open his windows into the pure air. "All the conditions of life are raised by the meaning Jesus has shown to be in them."

Certainly, it was not for nothing that Christ came into the conditions of the human life. His experience on earth comprehended every privation, every limitation, known to the physical life. Not only these,—but He experienced every phase of sorrow, of trial, of mental pain, of spiritual anguish. He was misunderstood, He was misrepresented, He was assailed and crucified. He understood the needs of the body as well as of the spirit. He had no contempt[Pg 357] nor condemnation for comfort, prosperity, or wealth, in and of themselves. He simply regarded them as means to an end, and if nobly used to noble ends, life was the better for whatever phases and factors of power it possessed. But He taught the truth that here we have no continuing city; that this temporary sojourn on earth is designed as a period in which to develop qualities rather than to heap up accumulations. "What shall it profit a man," He well said, "if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

So here was a man, living the earthly and physical life; comprehending all the earthly and physical problems involved in relation with the physical world; not ignoring or denying them like a mere fanatic, but estimating them in the true scale of values,—here was a man who by his experience and example proved that personal holiness of life is not incompatible with personal attention to every detail of human affairs. Jesus did not isolate Himself in a monastic cell in order to live the life of the spirit. He practically taught that the very supreme test of the life of the spirit is to live it in the[Pg 358] heart of human activities. It is in the resistless tide of daily affairs,—in the office of the lawyer, the journalist, the physician, the architect; in the studio of the artist, in the counting-room, the bank, the salesroom, and the market-place, that the life of personal holiness is possible, and it is possible to man because Jesus, taking upon Himself the human life, so lived it in these very circumstances and under these conditions. Christ and His all-quickening life remain in the world. They did not leave it with His physical death. They remain as the incorruptible, the glorious, the priceless possession of every man and woman to-day. To this divine example of a perfect character revealed in the guise of the human life, each individual in the world to-day can turn, as the most practical ideal by which to shape his own life and to ultimately realize the command, "Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." If this transcendent ideal were not a possibility for the soul, surely God would not have given it as an idle command; but man, as a spiritual being, is designed to live the spiritual life, and this life is that of perpetual spiritual progress and[Pg 359] ideal achievement; of entering into that golden atmosphere in which he shall not only

but find, in an ever-increasing degree, that the dream is merged into the profoundest reality of experience.

"Present suffering is not enjoyable," said the late Rev. Doctor Maltbie Davenport Babcock, "but life would be worth little without it. The difference between iron and steel is fire, but steel is worth all it costs. Iron ore may think itself senselessly tortured in the furnace, but when the watch-spring looks back it knows better. David enjoyed pain and trouble no more than we do, but the time came when he admitted that they had been good for him. Though the aspect of suffering is hard, the prospect is hopeful.... The tests of life are to make, not break us. The blow at the outward man may be the greatest blessing to the inner man. If God, then, puts, or permits, anything hard in our lives, be sure that the real peril, the real trouble, is what we shall lose if we flinch or rebel."[Pg 360]

Doctor Babcock's words suggest that there is perhaps nothing in all the divine teachings that is less understood and less accepted than the assertion of Saint Paul, "We glory in tribulation also." The general reader of the gospels and epistles—even the prayerful and reverent reader—relegates this expression to some abstract conditions, as something that might do very well for Saint Paul and a rudimentary civilization; as something that might be a very appropriate and decorous sentiment for Saint Sebastian on his gridiron, or Saint Catherine keeping her vigils in the vast and gloomy old church in Siena, but which certainly can bear no relation and hold no message for the modern reader. For the electric life of the hour,—full of color and vitality; throbbing with achievement; the life that craves prosperity as its truest expression, and finds adversity a poor and mean failure quite unsuitable to a man of brilliant gifts and energy; the life that believes in its own right of way and mistakes possessions for power,—what has it to do with "tribulation" except to refuse it? If it comes it is met with indignant protest rather than as a phase of experience in which to "glory;" it is[Pg 361] evaded, if possible; and if it cannot be evaded it is received with rebellion, with gloom, with despondency, and perhaps, at last, an enforced and hopeless endurance, which is not, by the way, to be mistaken for resignation. Endurance is a passive condition that cannot, and does not even try, to help itself. Resignation, in its true reading, is wholly another matter; it is active, it is alive, it is conscious and intelligent and in joyful co-operation with the will of God. It is no poor and negative mental state; it is rich in vitality and in hope, as well, for in its absolute identification of itself, this human will with the divine will, it enters into a kingdom of untold glory, whose paths lead by the river of life to the noblest and most exalted heights of achievement and of undreamed-of joy.

If this be true of resignation, what shall be said of tribulation,—of glorying in tribulation? A man awakens to find himself in poverty instead of in wealth; his possessions suddenly swept away; or from health, he, or some one whose life is still dearer to him than his own, prostrated with illness; or to find himself unjustly accused or maligned, or misunderstood, or to encounter[Pg 362] some other of the myriad phases of what he calls misfortune and tribulation. How is he to endure it? How is he to go on, living his life, in all this pain, perplexity, trial, or annoyance, much less to "glory" in this atmosphere of tribulation? One is engaged, it may be, in a work for which it would seem that peace of mind and joy and radiance were his only working capital; his essential resources; and suddenly these vanish, and his world is in ruins. Clouds of misapprehension envelop him round about, and he can neither understand, himself, what has produced them, nor can he, by any entreaty or appeal, be permitted the vantage ground of full and clear explanation. And his energies are paralyzed; the golden glory that enfolded his days investing them with a magical enchantment, has gone, and a leaden sky shuts him into a gloomy and leaden atmosphere. It is not only himself, but his work; not only what he may feel, but what, also, he may not accomplish. And his work is of a nature that is not only his own expression, his contribution to the sum of living, but one which involves responsibility to others, and some way,—well or ill, as may be,—it must be done. Shall he, can he, "glory"[Pg 363] in this paralyzing pain and torture that so mysteriously has fallen upon him,—whose causes do not, so far as he can discern, lie in his own conduct, but in some impenetrable mystery of misapprehensions and misunderstandings; a tangled labyrinth to which he is denied the clue? Can he, indeed, facing all this torture and tragedy, with all that made the joy and light of life withdrawn,—can he encounter this form of tribulation with serene poise, with unfaltering purpose, with an intense and exalted faith? It is "not enjoyable," indeed, as Doctor Babcock, in the quotation above, at once concedes; but that the experience has a meaning,—a very profound meaning, one must believe; and believing this, he must feel that the responsibility rests on himself to accept this new significance that has, in an undreamed-of way, fallen into his life; to read its hidden lesson; to transmute it, by the miracle of divine grace, into something fairer and sweeter; to let its scorching fire make steel of that which was only iron. To accept, to believe, to feel this, in every fibre of his nature, is to "glory" in the tribulation. It is to extract its best meaning, and to go on[Pg 364] in life better equipped than before. "The tests of life are to make and not break us." Here is the truer view, and one that reveals the divine significance in all mysteries of human experience. Beyond all these views, also, is that inflorescence of joy that springs from this more complete identification of one's own will with that of the divine. One comes into the full glow and beauty of that wonderful assurance of Jesus: "These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full."

This fulness of joy is a condition freely offered for perfect acceptance. The varied experiences are, as Browning has said, "just a stuff to try the soul's strength on." The kingdom of heaven lies open to all; it is at hand, not waiting afar in some vague futurity. Shall we not enter to-day into this kingdom of heaven which is at hand? Shall we not enter to-day into the very joy of the Lord? Pain and sorrow may invest the conditions of the moment, but they are forces which are transmuting the inconsequential into the significant; the common and trivial into the exalted and the sublime. The discord is[Pg 365] merged into sublime harmonies that thrill the air; the glory of the Lord shines round about, and we enter into its illumination; we are ascending the Mount of Vision and the soul looketh steadily onward, discerning the beauty of holiness, in whose transfiguration gleams the fairest ideal revealed to humanity,—even the Life Radiant.[Pg 367][Pg 366]

INDEX.

Faraday, Michael, 338.
Faust, 49.
Fénelon, 302.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 68.
Field, Cyrus, 116.
Fiske, Dr. John, consummation of organic evolution, 113;
degree of achievement above the level of death, 327.
Flagstaff, 234;
cosmopolitan influence of, 235.
Florence, 251.
Foretelling of the future, 24.
Fort Steele, 249.
"Forum, The," article of Edward Everett Hale in, 79.
Fuller, Margaret, defines social sympathies, 217.

Hale, Rev. Dr. Edward Everett, prediction of, 79, 80;
memory of, 150.
Hall, General, writes of Nathan Cook Meeker, 247.
Hamilton, Gail, 42.
Harris, Dr. William Torrey, 190.
Harvard, 55, 198.
Hayes, Hon. Rutherford B., appoints Nathan Cook Meeker Indian
Commissioner, 236, 247.
Heavenly Vision, 302.
Helbaicy, M. Tessier d', theory of, 135, 136.
Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig, 338.
Henley, William Ernest, 355.
Hilty, Carl, his ideas on Happiness, 343.
Himalayas, 233.
Holland, Canon Scott, discussions of, 163;
arraigns modern teachings, 164, 165;
characterizes the ether, 166.
Holmes, Dr. Oliver Wendell, counsel of, 47.
Holy Spirit, the, 280, 331.
"Hope of Religion," 223.
Hugo, Victor, lines of, 273.
"Human Freedom," 55.
"Human Personality," 129, 148.
Humanity, 221.

Jacob's ladder, 298.
James, Prof. William, demonstration of, 55;
depicts power of the Holy Spirit, 331.
Jesus, 277.
Joule, Dr., 338.

Kaiser Wilhelm II., the, 150.
Kelvin, Lord, 263.
Kerchsoff, 337.
Kingsford, Dr. Anna, née Bonus, remarkable mystic writings of, 255;
marriage of, 256;
theories of, 257, 259;
remarkable interpretation of life of, 261.

Reichenbach, Anton Benedict, remarkable experiments of, 135.
Roberts, Professor, electrical work of, 153.
Robinson, Solon, 241.
Rocky Mountains, the, 244.
Röntgen ray, 41, 60, 73.
Royal Gorge, 226.
—— Institute, 81.
—— Society, 12.
—— University of Denmark, 151.
Royce, Prof. Josiah, 32.
Rumford, Count, experiments of, 338.

Saint John, 226.
—— Paul, the two bodies described by, 32;
counsel of, 64;
spiritual things discerned by, 84, 143, 178;
admonitions of, 310, 325, 326;
Cathedral of, 163.
—— Pierre, 48.
—— Sulpice, 275.
San Francisco, 234.
Santa Fé road, 233.
Secretary of War, the, 249.
Shakespeare, 201.
Sherman, Gen. W. T., 249.
Shinumo Altar, 236.
Silver State, the, 254.
Sir Hugo, 222.
Smyth, Rev. Dr. Newman, 66.
Snowy Range, the, 238.
Society of Arts, 124.
Solomon's Temple, 227.
South Platte River, 244.
Southern Cross, 142.
Spencer, Herbert, 204.
Spirit, whisper of the, 305.
State University Observatory, Minnesota, 144.
Stowe, Mrs. Harriet, née Beecher, 213.

Lilian Whiting's Works

The World Beautiful. First Series

The World Beautiful. Second Series

The World Beautiful. Third Series

After Her Death. The Story of a Summer

The Spiritual Significance

Kate Field: A Record

From Dreamland Sent. Verses of the Life to Come

A Study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The World Beautiful in Books

Boston Days

The Life Radiant

The World Beautiful

By LILIAN WHITING

I know of no volumes of sermons published in recent years which are so well fitted to uplift the reader, and inspire all that is finest and best in his nature, as are the series of essays entitled "The World Beautiful," by Lilian Whiting.—B. O. Flower, in The Coming Age.

16mo. Cloth, $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25. Comprising: The World Beautiful; Friendship; Our Social Salvation; Lotus Eating; That Which is to Come.

The world beautiful about which she writes is no far-off event to which all things move, but the every-day scene around us filled by a spirit which elevates and transforms it.—Prof. Louis J. Block, in The Philosophical Journal.

No one can read it without feeling himself the better and richer and happier for having done so.—The Independent.

16mo. Cloth, $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25. Comprising: The World Beautiful; Our Best Society; To Clasp Eternal Beauty; Vibrations; The Unseen World.

The style is at once graceful and lively. Every touch is fresh.—Zion's Herald.

16mo. Cloth, $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25. Comprising: The World Beautiful; the Rose Of Dawn; the Encircling Spirit-world; The Ring of Amethyst; Paradisa Gloria.

The thoughtful reader who loves spiritual themes will find these pages inspiring.—Chicago Inter-Ocean.[Pg 380]

After Her Death

The Story of a Summer

By Lilian Whiting, author of "The World Beautiful," etc. 16mo. Cloth, $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25.

Comprising: What Lacks the Summer? From Inmost Dreamland; Past the Morning Star; In Two Worlds; Distant Gates of Eden; Unto My Heart Thou Livest So; Across the World I Speak To Thee; the Deeper Meaning of The Hour.

My conviction is that every preacher, reformer, religious editor, and Christian worker should read the books by Lilian Whiting.—Rev. W. H. Rogers, in The Christian Standard.

"After Her Death" has given me the light and help I have so long craved; it has given me comfort and strength which no other book has ever done.—Cordelia L. Commore.

From Dreamland Sent

Verses of the Life to Come

By Lilian Whiting. New Edition, with additional verses, 16mo. Cloth, extra, $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25.

Lilian Whiting's verse is like a bit of sunlit landscape on a May morning.—Boston Herald.

Graceful, tender, and true, appealing to what is best in the human heart.—The Independent.

I never saw anything on earth before which looked so much as if just brought from heaven by angel hands as this new edition of "From Dreamland Sent." In the golden sunshine of an Italian morning I have heard the silver trumpets blow. This exquisite book reminds me of them.—Sarah Holland Adams.[Pg 381]

Kate field: A Record

By Lilian Whiting. Author of "The World Beautiful," "A Study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning," etc. With several portraits of Miss Field, including one by Elihu Vedder. 12mo. Cloth, extra. $2.00.

An Interesting Heredity; Family Letters; Mr. and Mrs. Field's Stage Life; Death of Joseph M. Field; The Mother and Daughter.

Aspirations and Studies; Interest in Art and Literature; Ardent Devotion to Music.

At Villa Bellosguardi; Enthusiasm for Italy; George Eliot and the Trollopes; Walter Savage Landor; At Casa Guidi with the Brownings.

Intense Energy of Purpose; John Brown's Grave; Ristori, Fechter, and the Drama; Planchette's Diary; Death of Eliza Riddle Field.

Among London Celebrities; In Spain with Castelar; Music and Drama; Professor Bell and the Telephone; The Shakespeare Memorial.

Return to America; Failures and Renewed Effort; The Mormon Problem; Alaska and the Golden Gate; Fame and Friends.

A Unique Enterprise; Miss Gilder's Friendship; Charming Life in the Capitol; The Columbian Exposition; France decorated Kate Field.

A Journey of Destiny; Life and Studies in Hawaii; Noble and Generous Work; The Angel of Death.

Universal Appreciation and Love; The Strange Ordering of Circumstance; A Sculptured Cross in Mount Auburn; Death only an Event in Life.[Pg 382]

The Spiritual Significance

or, Death as an Event in Life

By Lilian Whiting. Author of "The World Beautiful," "Boston Days," etc. 16mo. Cloth, $1.00. Decorated cloth, gilt top, $1.25. Comprising: The Spiritual Significance; Vision And Achievement; Between the Seen and The Unseen; Psychic Communication; the Gates Of New Life.

It suggests and hints at the ultimate significance of scientific investigation with relation to the totality of thought in a very fresh and suggestive way.... The spirit of her book, like that of its predecessors, is admirable.—The Outlook.

A book from her pen means new flashes of insight, a revelation of spiritual truth almost Emersonian in kind.—Chicago Chronicle.

The World Beautiful in Books

By Lilian Whiting. 16mo. Cloth, $1.00 net. Decorated cloth, $1.25 net.

The careful and repeated reading of "The World Beautiful in Books" would be a liberal education.—Philadelphia Telegraph.

It is like a Greek urn filled with priceless relics. Hundreds of brains, ancient and modern, are daintily picked of their best thoughts, and there is scarcely a page that is not enriched with some rifled treasure. It is, in fact, concentrated food for select minds.—Chicago Post.

To read it is like being taken informally into a great assemblage of poets, romancers, and thinkers, while all are at their best, and being introduced to them by a near friend of all.—The Era, Philadelphia.[Pg 383]

Boston Days

The City of Beautiful Ideals, Concord and Its Famous Authors, The Golden Age of Genius, Dawn of the Twentieth Century. By Lilian Whiting. Author of "The World Beautiful," etc. With portraits and other illustrations. 12mo. Decorated cloth, $1.50 net.

All the famous names associated with Boston pass in review before the reader of this apotheosis of the intellectual life of Massachusetts.—The Boston Herald.

The book is full of fascination of the intrinsic sort, by virtue of the material of which it is made up, and Miss Whiting has fulfilled her task with special literary grace and discretion.—Albany Argus.

A volume to place on the same shelf with the "Yesterdays With Authors" of the late James T. Fields and the "Literary Friends and Acquaintances" of William D. Howells.—Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The Life Radiant

By Lilian Whiting, 16mo. Cloth, $1.00 net. Decorated cloth, $1.25 net.

In this book Miss Whiting aims to portray a practical ideal for daily living that shall embody the sweetness and exaltation and faith that lend enchantment to life. It is, in a measure, a logical sequence of "The World Beautiful," leading into still diviner harmonies.

Little, Brown, & Company, Publishers

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The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Life Radiant, by Lilian Whiting

E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

THE LIFE RADIANT

BY

LILIAN WHITING

Author of "The World Beautiful," "The Spiritual Significance"

"The World Beautiful in Books," "Kate Field,

a Record," "Boston Days," etc.

"Follow it, follow it,

Follow the Gleam."

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1903

TO

ARVILLA DELIGHT MEEKER

(MRS. NATHAN COOK MEEKER)

IN WHOSE BEAUTIFUL LIFE PATIENCE HAS DONE HER

PERFECT WORK, AND WHOSE UNFALTERING AND

JOYFUL FAITH IN GOD REVEALS IMPRESSIVE

TRUTH IN THE LIFE RADIANT OF

HOLY LIVING

THESE PAGES ARE INSCRIBED WITH

THE DEVOTION OF

LILIAN WHITING

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE LIFE RADIANT.

THE GOLDEN AGE LIES ONWARD.

DISCERNING THE FUTURE.

THE ETHEREAL REALM.

THE POWER OF THE EXALTED MOMENT.

THE NECTAR OF THE HOUR.

INDEX.

Lilian Whiting's Works

The World Beautiful. First Series

The World Beautiful. Second Series

The World Beautiful. Third Series

After Her Death. The Story of a Summer

The Spiritual Significance

Kate Field: A Record

From Dreamland Sent. Verses of the Life to Come

A Study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The World Beautiful in Books

Boston Days

The Life Radiant

The World Beautiful

By LILIAN WHITING

After Her Death

The Story of a Summer

From Dreamland Sent

Verses of the Life to Come

Kate field: A Record

CONTENTS

The Spiritual Significance

or, Death as an Event in Life

The World Beautiful in Books

Boston Days

The Life Radiant

Little, Brown, & Company, Publishers

254 Washington Street, Boston, Mass.

E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)