initial commit of ebook 23820HEADmain

400 files changed, 24221 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/23820-8.txt b/23820-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..58e47fb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7995 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Life Radiant, by Lilian Whiting
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Life Radiant
+
+
+Author: Lilian Whiting
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 11, 2007  [eBook #23820]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE RADIANT***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Book Cover]
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+                                         PAGE
+  THE GOLDEN AGE LIES ONWARD.
+
+    THE SUPREME ILLUMINATION               24
+    CREATING THE NEW WORLD                 26
+    ELIMINATING ANXIETIES                  33
+    HEAVEN'S PERFECT HOUR                  37
+    LOVE AND GOOD WILL                     46
+    THE DIVINER POSSIBILITIES              51
+    THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST                 64
+
+  DISCERNING THE FUTURE.
+
+    A DETERMINING QUESTION                 85
+    IN PROPORTION TO POWER                 99
+
+  THE ETHEREAL REALM.
+
+    A SCIENTIFIC FACT                     124
+    A GLORIOUS INAUGURATION               136
+    FINER COSMIC FORCES                   149
+    HEALTH AND HAPPINESS                  158
+    A NEW FORCE                           172
+    THE SERVICE OF THE GODS               174
+
+  THE POWER OF THE EXALTED MOMENT.
+
+    OBEY THE VISION                       192
+    THE OPEN DOOR                         201
+    INTERRUPTIONS AS OPPORTUNITIES        204
+    THE CHARM OF COMPANIONSHIP            214
+    A SUMMER PILGRIMAGE IN ARIZONA        226
+    A TRAGIC IDYL OF COLORADO             237
+    A REMARKABLE MYSTIC                   254
+    THE MOMENTOUS QUESTION                261
+
+  THE NECTAR OF THE HOUR.
+
+    A PROFOUND EXPERIENCE                 285
+    THE LAW OF PRAYER                     299
+    CONDUCT AND BEAUTY                    313
+    THE DIVINE PANORAMA                   321
+    ALSO THE HOLY GHOST, THE COMFORTER    331
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE RADIANT.
+
+  "_I am Merlin
+  Who follow the Gleam._"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  _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.
+
+
+
+
+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 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."
+
+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 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 twofold 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 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 beautiful 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.
+
+Like an echo of celestial music are these lines by Sully-Prudhomme:--
+
+  "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" 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 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 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 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 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 recognize 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 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 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
+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 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
+
+  "Born and nourished in miracles."
+
+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:
+
+  "The Fairest enchants me,
+  The Mighty commands me,"
+
+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; 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, 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 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
+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
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Supreme Illumination.]
+
+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."
+
+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; 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Creating the New World.]
+
+"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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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."
+
+[Sidenote: Eliminating Anxieties.]
+
+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
+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,--
+
+  "Things are in the saddle
+  And ride mankind."
+
+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 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 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  "I will wait heaven's perfect hour
+  Through the innumerable years."
+
+[Sidenote: Heaven's Perfect Hour.]
+
+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
+drifting 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 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 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
+
+  "Black spirits or white, blue spirits or gray,"
+
+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. 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 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 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 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 sympathy, 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:--
+
+  "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.
+
+  "I fancied he was fled."
+
+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!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Love and Good Will.]
+
+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?"
+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 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.... 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."
+
+The writer describes the discovery and processes at some length, and
+adds:--
+
+     "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."
+
+The article closes with this wonderful paragraph:--
+
+     "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 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
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Diviner Possibilities.]
+
+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,--
+
+  "Does the road wind up hill all the way?"
+
+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 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 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 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 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
+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 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 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 moving 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 opportunity; 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 "plastic to the spirit
+touch;" sensitive to those vibrations too fine to be registered by the
+outward ear.
+
+  "Thought is the wages
+  For which I sell days,"
+
+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--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: "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 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.
+
+[Sidenote: The Weight of the Past.]
+
+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 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 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, 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 measures 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     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_.
+
+                                   --PHILLIPS BROOKS.
+
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 "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 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:--
+
+     "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.
+
+To see the future as clearly as we see the past, what does it require?
+
+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
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: A Determining Question.]
+
+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:
+
+     "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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: In Proportion to Power.]
+
+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 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.
+
+  "Lift up your hearts."
+  "We lift them up unto the Lord."
+
+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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+                                    --SIR WILLIAM CROOKES.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     _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._
+
+                                          --HUMAN PERSONALITY.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     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 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
+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. 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 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 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 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 strengthened 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."
+
+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 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 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. 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: A Scientific Fact.]
+
+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,
+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 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 conscious, 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.
+
+Sir William Preece, in a recent address before the Royal Society,
+remarked:--
+
+     "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 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 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.
+
+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, 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 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 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 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
+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 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.
+
+[Sidenote: A Glorious Inauguration.]
+
+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 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 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 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 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, 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 conceptions 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 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 distinct 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 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 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 physical 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 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 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."
+
+[Sidenote: Finer Cosmic Forces.]
+
+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 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 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 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!"
+
+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 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 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 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 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.
+
+Of telepathy Doctor Lodge says:--
+
+     "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 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."
+
+Will this theory furnish the basis for a true interpretation of
+telepathy?
+
+The relations between the individual and the forces of the ethereal
+realm are also determining as regards health.
+
+[Sidenote: Health and Happiness.]
+
+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 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.
+
+Professor John D. Quackenbos has recently said of Hypnotism:--
+
+     "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 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
+physical 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 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 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 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 investigation 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 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
+
+  "The spirit world around this world of sense
+  Floats like an atmosphere...."
+
+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 tenderness, 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 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
+action on the spiritual side. A thought has the force of a deed, and
+there is a literal truth in the line,--
+
+  "The good, though only thought, has life and breath;"
+
+and in Lowell's words:--
+
+  "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
+
+      "--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 receive the Divine messages
+and to follow the Divine leadings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: A New Force.]
+
+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 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 Quackenbos, 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Service of the Gods.]
+
+"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.
+
+     "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 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
+
+  "... by the Vision splendid
+  Is on his way attended,"
+
+he must give heed to the vision or it vanishes and returns no more.
+
+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,--
+
+  "All is waste and worthless till
+  Arrives the wise selecting will,"
+
+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 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 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. "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,--
+
+  "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 grievous; 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, 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."
+
+Mr. Leadbeater continues:--
+
+     "Still more pregnant of results for good or evil are a man's
+     thought about other people, for in that 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
+psychologists 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.
+
+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 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 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 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.
+
+[Sidenote: Obey the Vision.]
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+  "Success in thyself, which is best of all."
+
+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 manners,"--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
+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 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 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Open Door.]
+
+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 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," 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.
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Interruptions as Opportunities.]
+
+"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 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-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 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 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 "disease," 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 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 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 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 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 irritation 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."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Charm of Companionship.]
+
+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 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 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 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 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."
+
+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 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 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 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 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?"
+
+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, 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: A Summer Pilgrimage in Arizona.]
+
+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
+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 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 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 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
+prodigious 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 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 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 enchanted 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
+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 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 from inscrutable gloom; dreams of
+mountains, as in their sleep they brood on things eternal."
+
+[Sidenote: A Tragic Idyl of Colorado.]
+
+  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; 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,
+education, 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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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.
+
+Mr. Meeker further stipulated:--
+
+"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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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-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.
+
+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.
+
+     "Say not the struggle naught availeth."
+
+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. Unfalteringly, 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: A Remarkable Mystic.]
+
+     "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.... 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+We find her saying:--
+
+     "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 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Momentous Question.]
+
+     "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 emphasis
+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 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?
+
+  "She felt it die a little every day,
+  Flutter more wildly and more feebly pray."
+
+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 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 _re_union and
+_com_munion 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+THE NECTAR OF THE HOUR.
+
+  I share the good with every flower,
+  I drink the nectar of the hour.
+
+                        --EMERSON.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     _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:--
+
+  "I share the good with every flower,
+  I drink the nectar of the hour."
+
+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. 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 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, "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 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. 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 spiritual 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
+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.
+
+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."
+
+Père De Caussade proceeds to say:--
+
+     "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.
+
+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?
+
+"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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: A Profound Experience.]
+
+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 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.
+
+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 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,
+    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 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."
+
+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 individual. 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,
+    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 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.
+
+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 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, 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
+fulfilment, 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 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."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Law of Prayer.]
+
+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." 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, 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.
+
+"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 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, 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 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."
+
+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 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!"
+
+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 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
+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 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 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 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Conduct and Beauty.]
+
+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 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, 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 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 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 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 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
+
+  "Every morn is the world made new."
+
+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?"
+
+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
+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.
+
+  "One's self must never give way--that is the final substance."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Divine Panorama.]
+
+"Do we not all wish that we could live our lives over again in the light
+of 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
+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 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 pining:
+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
+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 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 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 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 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.]
+
+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 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,
+anxious, 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," 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 therefore 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 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 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 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
+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
+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 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 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 aspiration. 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 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."
+
+Mrs. Browning has a line in "Aurora Leigh" that runs,--
+
+  "And having tried all other ways, to just try God's."
+
+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 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."
+
+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,--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."
+
+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 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 whatever 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 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 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 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 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 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."
+
+  "I thank whatever gods there be
+  For my unconquerable soul,"
+
+sings William Ernest Henley, and he closes with the ringing lines,--
+
+  "I am the Captain of my fate,
+  I am the master of my soul."
+
+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
+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 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 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 ideal achievement; of entering into that golden
+atmosphere in which he shall not only
+
+  "--dream of summers and dream of flowers
+  That last alway,"
+
+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."
+
+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 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 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" 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+  Abbott, Rev. Dr. Lyman, 83, 223.
+  Academy of Science, 10.
+  Adams, Hon. Alva, his tribute to Nathan Cook Meeker, 248.
+  ----, General, 250.
+  Africa, 230.
+  Albertson, Dr., his invention, 151, 152, 153.
+  Altar of Perpetual Adoration, 19.
+  Ames, Dr. Charles Gordon, his uplifting sermons, 223, 322, 324.
+  Andes, the, 125.
+  Arizona, 205, 226.
+  Armstrong, Gen. Samuel Chapman, 247.
+  Arno, the, 251.
+  Arnold, Sir Edwin, 65, 68.
+  ----, Matthew, 198, 313.
+  Atlantic, the, 125.
+  ---- cable, 116.
+  ---- coast, 92.
+  "Aurora Leigh," 345.
+  Austrian, 135.
+  Avernus, 51.
+  Ayrton, Prof. W. E., 124, 126.
+
+  Babcock, Rev. Dr. Maltbie Davenport, his noble words, 359, 360, 363.
+  Balzac, Honoré de, 103.
+  "Banquo," 253.
+  Baptist belief, 169.
+  Beethoven, 228.
+  Behmen, Jacob, 255.
+  Besant, Annie, her theories on Prayer, 298, 299, 300.
+  Bible, the, 126.
+  Bonus, John, 256.
+  Boston, 150, 234.
+  Brewster, Elder, 241.
+  "Bright Angel Trail, The," 233.
+  British Isles, 142.
+  Brooks, Rt. Rev. Dr. Phillips, 31, 53, 62, 183, 192, 204, 267,
+      268, 293, 347.
+  Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 345.
+  ----, Robert, 265, 364.
+  Bunsen, Dr. Robert Wilhelm, 337.
+  Bushnell, Rev. Dr. Horace, 351.
+
+  Cache la Poudre, 244.
+  Carboniferous, 229.
+  Centennial Exhibition, the, 245, 246.
+  Chemical Society, 48.
+  Cheyenne, 240.
+  ---- Cañon, 226, 232, 233.
+  Chicago, 93.
+  Christmas, 242.
+  "Clothed with the Sun," 255.
+  Colorado River, 230.
+  ----, State of, 191, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245,
+      246, 247, 248, 251, 252, 253.
+  Columbia University Chemical Society, 48.
+  Congress, 246.
+  Connecticut, 241.
+  Cooper Institute, 240, 243.
+  Copley Square, 169.
+  Cosmos, the, 140.
+  "Courier Journal," 238, 241.
+  Crookes, Sir William, 9, 11.
+  Crusaders, the, 226.
+  "Culture," 198.
+  Curie, Professor, Radium discovered by, 9, 10.
+  ----, Madame, 9, 10.
+  Cushing, Frank, 235.
+
+  Daniel, Book of, 163.
+  "Daniel Deronda," 222.
+  Dante, 185, 309.
+  "Data of Ethics," 204.
+  Darwin, Dr. Charles, 83.
+  De Caussade, Père, 275, 280, 281, 284, 290.
+  Denver, 240.
+  Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, 251.
+  Discovery of the Future, 81.
+  Donald, Rev. Dr. E. Winchester, 223.
+  Divine Creation, 171.
+  ---- Love, 206, 288.
+  ---- Perfection, 300.
+  ---- Pressure, 199, 332.
+  ---- Truth, 286.
+  ---- Word, 314.
+  ---- Will, 89, 294.
+
+  Echo Cliffs, 236.
+  Edison, Thomas, 116.
+  Edwards, Jonathan, 171.
+  Egyptian, 80.
+  Eiffel Tower, 226.
+  Electricity, 174.
+  Eliot, President Charles W., 198.
+  Elizabeth, 242.
+  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 32, 40, 42, 45, 49, 61, 78, 81, 93, 175,
+      177, 196, 197, 202, 203, 214, 217, 221, 237, 241, 242, 309,
+      324, 339, 354, 355.
+  Empedocles, 78.
+  England, 256.
+  Episcopalian, 169.
+  Eros, 145.
+  "Esoteric Christianity," 298.
+  Europe, 137, 150.
+  "Evangeline," 250.
+  Evolution, 330.
+  "Expansion of Religion," 223.
+
+  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.
+
+  Galilee, 264.
+  Garden of the Gods, 242.
+  German, 334.
+  "Giver of all Good," 320.
+  Goethe, 198.
+  Gogol, 126.
+  Gordon, Rev. Dr. George A., 223.
+  Grand Cañon of the Colorado, 226, 228, 229, 233, 236.
+  Greek, 249.
+  Greeley, Horace, presided at meeting in Cooper Institute, 240;
+    invited Nathan Cook Meeker to place on "Tribune," 241;
+    encouraged founding of town, 243, 248;
+    portrait of, 253.
+  ----, town of, founded by Nathan Cook Meeker, 237, 240;
+    beautiful situation of, 244;
+    interest of, 245, 247.
+  "----, Tribune, The," founding of, 238.
+
+  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.
+
+  Indian, the, 247.
+  Indian Commissioner, 238.
+  Indiana, 205.
+  Indians, legislation for, 246, 248, 249, 250.
+  Isles of Patmos, 226.
+  Italy, 257.
+
+  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.
+
+  Lacordaire, Père, 229.
+  Lanier, Sidney, 65.
+  Latin, 198.
+  Leadbeater, C. W., 186.
+  Leavenworth, Professor, 144.
+  Lent, 285.
+  Leverrier, Urbain John Joseph, 84.
+  "Life Radiant, The," 3, 5, 6, 16, 24, 25. 26, 37, 348.
+  Lincoln, Abraham 7, 254.
+  Liverpool, 150.
+  Lodge, Sir Oliver, 9;
+    new problems presented, by, 153, 154, 155;
+    his theories regarding telepathy, 157.
+  Loeb, Dr., 25.
+  London, 86, 154, 216.
+  Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 292.
+  Long's Peak, 244.
+  Lot, 202.
+  Louis XV., 149.
+  Lowell Institute, 234.
+  Lowell, James Russell, 170.
+  ----, John, 234.
+  ---- Observatory, 234.
+  ----, Prof. Percival, his astronomical work, 234, 235.
+
+  Maeterlinck, Maurice, the future discussed by, 91, 93, 94, 96;
+    theories of, 98, 101;
+    insights of, 193, 207.
+  Magi, the, 265, 346.
+  Marconi, Guglielmo, genius of, 5, 116;
+    system of, 125;
+    ship detector of, 134;
+    predictions of, fulfilled, 136.
+  Marie Antoinette, 149.
+  Mars, 127, 234.
+  Massachusetts, diocese of, 54.
+  ----, Bishop of, 54.
+  Mayer, Julius Robert von, 338.
+  Meeker, Arvilla Delight, née Smith (Mrs. Nathan Cook Meeker), 249,
+      250, 252.
+  ----, Nathan Cook, town of Greeley, Colo., founded by, 237;
+    visions of, 238, 239;
+    outlines plans, 240;
+    birth of, 241;
+    editorial work of, praised by Emerson, 242;
+    municipal principles of, 243, 244, 245;
+    appointed commissioner to Centennial Exposition, 246;
+    "The Greeley Tribune" founded by, 246;
+    Indian policy of, 246, 247;
+    difficulties encountered by, 247;
+    massacre of, 247;
+    estimation of, 251, 252;
+    work of, 253;
+    noble ideals of, 254.
+  ----, Josephine, 248, 249, 250, 252.
+  Mesozoic age, 229.
+  Michael Angelo, 228.
+  Mont Pelee, 48, 50.
+  Montana, 205.
+  Morning Star, 204.
+  Mount Etna, 78.
+  ---- of Transfiguration, 88.
+  ---- of Vision, 365.
+  Moxom, Rev. Dr. Philip, 223.
+  Münsterberg, Prof. Hugo, 55.
+  Musée Cluny, the, 149, 150.
+  Myers, Frederic, W. H. 140, 148.
+
+  Nature, 171.
+  Naval Observatory, 127.
+  Neptune, 84.
+  New England, 213.
+  New Jersey, 242.
+  New Jerusalem, 226.
+  New Testament, 148.
+  New Year, the, 203, 204, 320.
+  New York, 240.
+  "New York Herald," 48, 151.
+  "---- Mirror," 241.
+  "---- Tribune," 238.
+  Niagara, 153, 226, 231.
+  Nile, 142
+
+  Observatory, the Minnesota University, 144.
+  Ohio, 241.
+  Orion, 317.
+  Ostwald, Dr., 334.
+
+  Paderewski, Ignace, 340.
+  Paradise, 63.
+  "Paradiso," 226.
+  Paris, 95, 149, 226, 275.
+  Parkhurst, Rev. Dr., 325, 328.
+  "Parsival," 265.
+  Permian, 229.
+  Phillips, Stephen, 145, 263.
+  Pierce, Hon. Franklin, 241.
+  Pike's Peak, 238, 239, 244.
+  Pope, General, 249.
+  Powell, Major John W., 231.
+  Preece, Sir William, 127.
+  Prentice, George D., 241.
+  Presbyterian, 169.
+  Promised Land, 204.
+  Protestant, 274.
+  Prudhomme, Sully, 8.
+  Psychical Research, 141.
+  Pueblo, 248.
+  Pyramids, 142, 143.
+
+  Quackenbos, Dr. John D., 160, 161, 172.
+
+  Reichenbach, Anton Benedict, remarkable experiments of, 135.
+  Roberts, Professor, electrical work of, 153.
+  Robinson, Solon, 241.
+  Rocky Mountains, the, 244.
+  Roentgen 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.
+
+  Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 87.
+  Tertiary, 229.
+  Tesla, Nicola, 116;
+    discovery of, 122;
+    human energy discussed by, 188.
+  Texas, 205.
+  "The Gleam," 182.
+  "The Inferno," 226.
+  "The Country God Forgot," 234.
+  "The Perfect Way," 255, 256.
+  "The World Beautiful," 25.
+  Thompson, Prof. J. J., 9.
+  Thornburg, Major, 249.
+  Titanic, 226.
+  Trinity Church, 54.
+  Twentieth Century, 198, 264.
+
+  Union Colony, 244, 247, 248, 253.
+  Unitarian, 169.
+  United States, 42.
+  Universe, 109.
+  Unseen, the, 173.
+  Ursa Major, 317, 318.
+  Utah, 228.
+  Utes, the, 247.
+
+  Vatican, the, 256.
+  Vedantic, 332.
+  Vedder, Elihu, 177.
+  "Vita Nuova," 185.
+
+  Walnut Cañon, 235.
+  Warren, Rev. Dr. Walpole, 60.
+  Washington, 127, 246.
+  Washington Monument, 227.
+  Watterson, Col. Henry, 241.
+  Wells, H. G., theories of, on foretelling the future, 81, 83.
+  West, the, 238.
+  Western Reserve, the, 241.
+  Westminster Abbey, 142.
+  White Mountains, the, 48.
+  White River, 238, 247, 251, 261.
+  Whittier, John Greenleaf, 288, 320.
+  Whyte, Rev. Dr. Alexander, 212.
+  Wilberforce, Rev. Dr. Basil, Archdeacon of Westminster, 141, 142.
+  Will of God, 282, 284.
+
+  Young, John Russell, 243.
+
+  Zuni, 235.
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+_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_.
+
+
+The World Beautiful (First Series)
+
+     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_.
+
+
+The World Beautiful (Second Series)
+
+     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_.
+
+
+The World Beautiful (Third Series)
+
+     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_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+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.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHILDHOOD AND CIRCUMSTANCE. An Interesting Heredity; Family Letters; Mr.
+and Mrs. Field's Stage Life; Death of Joseph M. Field; The Mother and
+Daughter.
+
+EARLY YOUTH. Aspirations and Studies; Interest in Art and Literature;
+Ardent Devotion to Music.
+
+FLORENTINE DAYS. At Villa Bellosguardi; Enthusiasm for Italy; George
+Eliot and the Trollopes; Walter Savage Landor; At Casa Guidi with the
+Brownings.
+
+LECTURING AND WRITING. Intense Energy of Purpose; John Brown's Grave;
+Ristori, Fechter, and the Drama; Planchette's Diary; Death of Eliza
+Riddle Field.
+
+EUROPE REVISITED. Among London Celebrities; In Spain with Castelar;
+Music and Drama; Professor Bell and the Telephone; The Shakespeare
+Memorial.
+
+A SIGNIFICANT DECADE. Return to America; Failures and Renewed Effort;
+The Mormon Problem; Alaska and the Golden Gate; Fame and Friends.
+
+"KATE FIELD'S WASHINGTON." A Unique Enterprise; Miss Gilder's
+Friendship; Charming Life in the Capitol; The Columbian Exposition;
+France decorated Kate Field.
+
+CROSSING THE BAR. A Journey of Destiny; Life and Studies in Hawaii;
+Noble and Generous Work; The Angel of Death.
+
+IN RETROSPECT. Universal Appreciation and Love; The Strange Ordering of
+Circumstance; A Sculptured Cross in Mount Auburn; Death only an Event in
+Life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+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
+
+254 Washington Street, Boston, Mass.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE RADIANT***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 23820-8.txt or 23820-8.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/3/8/2/23820
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://www.gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
diff --git a/23820-8.zip b/23820-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fe1d75c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-8.zip
diff --git a/23820-h.zip b/23820-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e81a3a5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-h.zip
diff --git a/23820-h/23820-h.htm b/23820-h/23820-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..42ccc00
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-h/23820-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,8215 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Life Radiant, by Lilian Whiting</title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+	 margin-top: 2em;
+	 margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+    .pagenum  { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+            /*  visibility: hidden;  */
+                position: absolute;
+                left: 92%;
+                font-size: smaller;
+                text-align: right;
+              } /* page numbers */
+
+     a:link {color:blue;
+           text-decoration:none}
+     link {color:blue;
+           text-decoration:none}
+     a:visited {color:blue;
+           text-decoration:none}
+     a:hover {color:red}
+
+    .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .sidenote {width: 12%; padding-bottom: .5em; padding-top: .5em;
+               padding-left: .5em; padding-right: .5em; margin-left: 1em;
+               float: right; clear: right; margin-top: 1em;
+               font-size: smaller; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: dashed 1px;}
+
+    .center   {text-align: center;}
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+    .u        {text-decoration: underline;}
+
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
+    .poem br          {display: none;}
+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem span.i0     {display: block; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 2em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    hr.full { width: 100%;
+              margin-top: 3em;
+              margin-bottom: 0em;
+              margin-left: auto;
+              margin-right: auto;
+              height: 4px;
+              border-width: 4px 0 0 0; /* remove all borders except the top one */
+              border-style: solid;
+              border-color: #000000;
+              clear: both; }
+    pre      {font-size: 85%;}
+    // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+    </style>
+</head>
+<body>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Life Radiant, by Lilian Whiting</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The Life Radiant</p>
+<p>Author: Lilian Whiting</p>
+<p>Release Date: December 11, 2007  [eBook #23820]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE RADIANT***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="center">
+    <a id="cover"></a>
+    <img src="images/cover.jpg" width="473" height="600"
+       alt=""
+       title="Book Cover" />
+</div>
+
+<h1>THE LIFE RADIANT</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>LILIAN WHITING</h2>
+
+<h4>Author of "The World Beautiful," "The Spiritual Significance"</h4>
+<h4>"The World Beautiful in Books," "Kate Field,</h4>
+<h4>a Record," "Boston Days," etc.</h4>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+<h6>"Follow it, follow it,</h6>
+<h6>Follow the Gleam."</h6>
+<p><br /></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>BOSTON</h4>
+<h4>LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY</h4>
+<h4>1903</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<h5>TO</h5>
+
+<h5>ARVILLA DELIGHT MEEKER</h5>
+
+<h5>(MRS. NATHAN COOK MEEKER)</h5>
+<p><br /></p>
+<h5>IN WHOSE BEAUTIFUL LIFE PATIENCE HAS DONE HER</h5>
+<h5>PERFECT WORK, AND WHOSE UNFALTERING AND</h5>
+<h5>JOYFUL FAITH IN GOD REVEALS IMPRESSIVE</h5>
+<h5>TRUTH IN THE LIFE RADIANT OF</h5>
+<h5>HOLY LIVING</h5>
+<p><br /></p>
+<h5>THESE PAGES ARE INSCRIBED WITH</h5>
+<h5>THE DEVOTION OF</h5>
+<h5>LILIAN WHITING</h5>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>TABLE OF CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<p>
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#THE_GOLDEN_AGE_LIES_ONWARD">THE GOLDEN AGE LIES ONWARD.</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#The_Supreme_Illumination"><span class="smcap">The Supreme Illumination</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#Creating_the_New_World"><span class="smcap">Creating the New World</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#Eliminating_Anxieties"><span class="smcap">Eliminating Anxieties</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#Heavens_Perfect_Hour"><span class="smcap">Heaven's Perfect Hour</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#Love_and_Good_Will"><span class="smcap">Love and Good Will</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#The_Diviner_Possibilities"><span class="smcap">The Diviner Possibilities</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#The_Weight_of_the_Past"><span class="smcap">The Weight of the Past</span></a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#DISCERNING_THE_FUTURE">DISCERNING THE FUTURE.</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_Determining_Question"><span class="smcap">A Determining Question</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#In_Proportion_to_Power"><span class="smcap">In Proportion to Power</span></a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#THE_ETHEREAL_REALM">THE ETHEREAL REALM.</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_Scientific_Fact"><span class="smcap">A Scientific Fact</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_Glorious_Inauguration"><span class="smcap">A Glorious Inauguration</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#Finer_Cosmic_Forces"><span class="smcap">Finer Cosmic Forces</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#Health_and_Happiness"><span class="smcap">Health and Happiness</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_New_Force"><span class="smcap">A New Force</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#The_Service_of_the_Gods"><span class="smcap">The Service of the Gods</span></a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#THE_POWER_OF_THE_EXALTED_MOMENT">THE POWER OF THE EXALTED MOMENT.</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#Obey_the_Vision"><span class="smcap">Obey the Vision</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#The_Open_Door"><span class="smcap">The Open Door</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#Interruptions_as_Opportunities"><span class="smcap">Interruptions as Opportunities</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#The_Charm_of_Companionship"><span class="smcap">The Charm of Companionship</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_Summer_Pilgrimage_in_Arizona"><span class="smcap">A Summer Pilgrimage in Arizona</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_Tragic_Idyl_of_Colorado"><span class="smcap">A Tragic Idyl of Colorado</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_Remarkable_Mystic"><span class="smcap">A Remarkable Mystic</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#The_Momentous_Question"><span class="smcap">The Momentous Question</span></a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#THE_NECTAR_OF_THE_HOUR">THE NECTAR OF THE HOUR.</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#A_Profound_Experience"><span class="smcap">A Profound Experience</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#The_Law_of_Prayer"><span class="smcap">The Law of Prayer</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#Conduct_and_Beauty"><span class="smcap">Conduct and Beauty</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#The_Divine_Panorama"><span class="smcap">The Divine Panorama</span></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;"><a href="#Also_the_Holy_Ghost"><span class="smcap">Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter</span></a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_LIFE_RADIANT" id="THE_LIFE_RADIANT"></a>THE LIFE RADIANT.</h2>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 20em;"><i>I am Merlin</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 20em;"><i>Who follow the Gleam.</i>"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 20%;" />
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;"><i>Know well, my soul, God's hand controls</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17em;"><i>Whate'er thou fearest;</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;"><i>Round Him in calmest music rolls</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17em;"><i>Whate'er thou hearest.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;"><i>What to thee is shadow, to Him is day,</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17em;"><i>And the end He knoweth.</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;"><i>And not on a blind and aimless way</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17em;"><i>The spirit goeth.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;"><span class="smcap">&mdash;Whittier</span>.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_GOLDEN_AGE_LIES_ONWARD" id="THE_GOLDEN_AGE_LIES_ONWARD"></a>THE GOLDEN AGE LIES ONWARD.</h2>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"The Golden Age lies onward, not behind.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">The pathway through the past has led us up:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">The pathway through the future will lead on,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">And higher."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">"Man may ask, and God may answer, but we may not understand,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Knowing but our own poor language, all the writing of His hand."</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> he who
+finds himself in one, is unable to pass to another.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;but is this
+all? His<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Like an echo of celestial music are these lines by Sully-Prudhomme:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"The lilies fade with the dying hours,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">Hushed is the song-bird's lay;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">But I dream of summers and dream of flowers</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">That last alway."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;possibly to be&mdash;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"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;radium. Science is, at this date,
+powerless to analyze or explain its marvellous power. The leading
+scientists of the world of learning&mdash;Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver
+Lodge, and Professor Curie (who, with Mme. Curie, has the honor of being
+its discoverer)&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Sir William Crookes, the world's greatest living physicist and
+experimental scientist, said of radium in the June of this 1903:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"In total darkness I laid a piece of pitchblende&mdash;the ore from
+which radium is extracted&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Radium is dangerous to handle. Once I carried<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> a tiny piece of
+radium in my waistcoat pocket to a soir&eacute;e 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&mdash;a little, tawny, crystalline patch. There would hardly be a
+larger quantity together in one box anywhere in England.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+atmosphere&mdash;the soul's native air&mdash;every energy is quickened. The divine
+realm is as truly the habitat of the spiritual man&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;the inevitable result&mdash;of the soul's lack of union with God; the
+lack of that <i>rapport</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> work together for good, but
+<i>all</i> things&mdash;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</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"Born and nourished in miracles."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"The Fairest enchants me,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">The Mighty commands me,"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;his own utter
+inability to understand the cause of the sorrow which is literally a
+thunderbolt out of a clear sky,&mdash;plunges him almost into despair. He had
+endeavored to give the best, but the result is as if he had given the
+worst;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> 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 <i>why</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> paralyzed cannot walk,&mdash;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&mdash;terribly mistaken&mdash;refuge of a great sorrow.
+And the remedy lies,&mdash;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 <i>body</i>,&mdash;he can do that at
+any moment and by an infinite variety of methods. But he cannot destroy
+<i>himself</i>. He may deprive himself of the instrument that was given to
+him for use in the physical world; he cannot escape from the duties<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+lesson of all time and eternity,&mdash;the lesson to accept and to joyfully
+embrace the will of God as thus revealed to him, in an inscrutable way.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="The_Supreme_Illumination" id="The_Supreme_Illumination"></a>The Supreme Illumination.</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">"Ah, when the infinite burden of life descendeth upon us,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Crushes to earth our hopes, and under the earth in the graveyard,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Then it is good to pray unto God, for His sorrowing children</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Turns He ne'er from the door, but He heals and helps and consoles them.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Yet is it good to pray when all things are prosperous with us;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Pray in fortunate days, for life's most beautiful fortune</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Kneels before the Eternal's gate, and with hands inter-folded,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">Praises, thankful and moved, the only Giver of blessings."</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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"&mdash;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;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="Creating_the_New_World" id="Creating_the_New_World"></a>Creating the New World.</div>
+
+<p>"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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>When one comes into any clear realization of this life of the
+spirit,&mdash;of its infinite outlook, its command of resources,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> trusted,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> believes in nothing and is in a state of
+despair and not hope, his energies are paralyzed. But hope lends
+wings,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>life</i>," said Jesus, "and have it more abundantly." It
+is only as one holds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> himself receptive to the divine currents that he
+has life, and it rests with himself to have it "more abundantly" every
+day and hour.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;that positive force to
+which all events and circumstances are negative.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> 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!&mdash;it seems to say,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="Eliminating_Anxieties" id="Eliminating_Anxieties"></a>Eliminating Anxieties.</div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+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,&mdash;weighted down with
+<i>things</i>, and quite illustrating the terse little couplet of Emerson,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"Things are in the saddle</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">And ride mankind."</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The things which rode these unfortunate beings&mdash;for the
+multi-millionaires may not unfrequently be so classed&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>Let one go on through the days doing the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"I will wait heaven's perfect hour</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Through the innumerable years."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="Heavens_Perfect_Hour" id="Heavens_Perfect_Hour"></a>Heaven's Perfect Hour.</div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>And yet&mdash;and yet&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Physicians and scientists have long since recognized that intense mental
+depression is as inevitably an accompaniment of <i>la grippe</i> 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,&mdash;not to say that the former presents itself
+to him as far the preferable course. So he envelops himself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">"Black spirits or white, blue spirits or gray,"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>which are to be exorcised by keeping close to beautiful thought,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> His words will work
+marvels. His thought is as luminous as a Roentgen ray.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> real, in the last analysis, save that
+which is ideal; and nothing is ideal that is not a spiritual reality.
+Then the question recurs,&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps one cause of much of the unhappiness and suffering that not
+infrequently invests relations that should only be those of joy and
+peace<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> 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,&mdash;the mere goods and
+chattels of life,&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> 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&mdash;not because it is of intrinsic value, not because it
+is of any particular importance <i>per se</i>, but because it is the visible
+representation of the spiritual gift of reverence, appreciation, and
+devotion&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>pathy, of intuitive comprehension, of helpful
+regard; and, curiously, these&mdash;the priceless and precious&mdash;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</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">"&mdash;&mdash;the little rift within the lute,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">That by and by will make the music mute."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"I fancied he was fled,&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">And, after many a year,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Glowed unexhausted kindliness</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Like daily sunrise there.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">My careful heart was free again.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">O friend, my bosom said,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Through thee alone the sky is arched,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Through thee the rose is red;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">All things through thee take nobler form."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>That alone is what all the loves and friendships of life are for,&mdash;that
+through their ministry life may take on nobler form.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"I fancied he was fled."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="Love_and_Good_Will" id="Love_and_Good_Will"></a>Love and Good Will.</div>
+
+<p>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?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+asked a French king of his confessor. "My son, you <i>must</i> 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&mdash;to say nothing of
+its being a somewhat more dignified process&mdash;to <i>be</i> what one wishes the
+world to regard him, than it is to endeavor to merely produce the effect
+of it.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Holmes had a bit of counsel for those who were out at sea,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>And so, any significance of achievement seems to be exactly conditioned
+by the degree of energy involved&mdash;the finer the energy, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> more potent
+the achievement. It would seem as if all the noble order of success
+hinged on two conditions,&mdash;the initial one of generating sufficient
+energy, and the second that of applying it worthily.</p>
+
+<p>The present age is characterized as that in which new forms of force
+appear,&mdash;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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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&deg;. It would melt the White Mountains into
+rivers of liquid fire. Nothing could withstand its consuming
+power....<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>The writer describes the discovery and processes at some length, and
+adds:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Such are the wonders of chemistry suggesting Emerson's claim,
+'Thought sets men free.' By a simple process&mdash;flame applied to
+metal filings&mdash;prison bars melt and vaulted dungeons flow like
+water."</p></div>
+
+<p>The article closes with this wonderful paragraph:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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,&mdash;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,&mdash;and new worlds seem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="The_Diviner_Possibilities" id="The_Diviner_Possibilities"></a>The Diviner Possibilities.</div>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">"Does the road wind up hill all the way?"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>as if to wind up hill were the type of trial, and the "descent of
+Avernus" were the type of joy.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> instead of
+in the worst. It is the way of the <i>transgressor</i> which is hard&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;albeit a rather curious and
+unaccountable one&mdash;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,&mdash;Phillips
+Brooks. When he was the rector of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> 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,&mdash;always provided
+that there is full conviction of immortality,&mdash;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,&mdash;and if we are not that we are nothing,&mdash;regarding
+ourselves as <i>temporarily inhabiting</i> 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
+<i>has</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> 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 M&uuml;nsterberg 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,&mdash;and if it does not then there is no
+immortality,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+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&mdash;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 <i>seance</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>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&mdash;his spiritual self&mdash;<i>can</i> "press on to the high calling of God."
+Man is a divine being; the divine life is his only true life.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> "plastic to the spirit
+touch;" sensitive to those vibrations too fine to be registered by the
+outward ear.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"Thought is the wages</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">For which I sell days,"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>&mdash;which has not the
+noble and spontaneous character of generosity&mdash;on the other. One
+imposes, the other is imposed on,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;when it is lived according to that inspiring injunction of
+Phillips Brooks:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> "Be such a man, live such a life, that if all lives
+were like yours earth would be Paradise."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Here, in the earth life, we have it in our power to seize our
+future destination.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Fichte.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="The_Weight_of_the_Past" id="The_Weight_of_the_Past"></a>The Weight of the Past.</div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"My soul is sailing through the sea,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">But the Past is heavy and hindereth me,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">The Past hath crusted cumbrous shells</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">That hold the flesh of cold sea-mells</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">About my soul.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">The huge waves wash, the high waves roll,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Each barnacle clingeth and worketh dole,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">And hindereth me from sailing!</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"Old Past, let go and drop i' the sea</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Till fathomless waters cover thee!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">For I am living, but thou art dead;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Thou drawest back, I strive ahead</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">The day to find.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Thy shells unbind! Night comes behind,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">I needs must hurry with the wind</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">And trim me best for sailing."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> it to him; but no safe
+logic proves it, and no entirely accepted voice from some farther world
+proclaims it."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;of motion and matter,&mdash;which is
+definitely proven by actual demonstration, suggests with a potency which
+no one can evade that intellect, emotion, and will&mdash;the most intense and
+resistless forces of the universe&mdash;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,&mdash;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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>The twentieth century leads faith to the brink of knowledge. The deepest
+spiritual feeling must perpetually recognize that faith alone&mdash;Christ's
+words alone&mdash;are enough for every human soul; but faith grows not less,
+but more, when informed by knowledge. When man meas<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>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&mdash;now and here&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>degree</i> of reality and significance depends wholly on ourselves; which
+is simply the achievement&mdash;better or poorer&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="DISCERNING_THE_FUTURE" id="DISCERNING_THE_FUTURE"></a>DISCERNING THE FUTURE.</h2>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 21em;"><i>As the sun,</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;"><i>Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;"><i>In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;"><i>Of great events stride on before the events,</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;"><i>And in to-day already walks to-morrow.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;"><i>There exist moments in the life of man</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;"><i>When he is nearer the great Soul of the world</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;"><i>Than is man's custom, and possesses freely</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;"><i>The power of questioning his destiny.</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 20em;"><span class="smcap">&mdash;Coleridge</span>.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 <i>for
+something</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;"><span class="smcap">&mdash;Phillips Brooks.</span></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> to think of it,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Is not the next step in scientific progress to be into the invisible and
+the unknown?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Now as the present largely determines the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> future, the things that shall
+be are partly of our own creation.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"We shape ourselves the joy or fear</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">Of which our coming life is made,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">And fill our future's atmosphere</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">With sunshine or with shade."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> that sense of freshness and exhilaration
+that one needs in order successfully to enter into the experiences of
+the present hour.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> "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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>"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:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 <span class="smcap">A.&nbsp;D.</span> 4000 were as fixed, settled,
+and unchangeable as those of <span class="smcap">A.&nbsp;D.</span> 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&mdash;one day in the unending succession of days&mdash;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."</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To see the future as clearly as we see the past, what does it require?</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="A_Determining_Question" id="A_Determining_Question"></a>A Determining Question.</div>
+
+<p>The question confronts one as a very determining problem in life,&mdash;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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I believe that every life is the exact and necessary outcome of
+its <i>environment</i>, 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:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Every phenomenon is the necessary result of pre-existing causes:</p>
+
+<p>"Life is but a succession of phenomena.</p>
+
+<p>"Therefore every life is necessarily determined by pre-existing
+causes.</p>
+
+<p>"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 <i>subjectively</i> we
+are in no sense free, because the peculiar way in which the <i>will</i>
+will act under given conditions must depend upon the preponderating
+<i>subjective</i> force. To hold otherwise is to contend that a lesser
+force can overcome a greater,&mdash;which is absurd."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> its house." Then, too, the thing we call
+life is not composed exclusively of character and circumstances. There
+enters into it a third element,&mdash;that of the unknown.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> 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,&mdash;growing ever larger and deeper and more
+exalted with its increasing power. In this way man produces his
+circumstances&mdash;creates his outer conditions. His successive environments
+become the expressions of his inner life<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> and energy in their series of
+development and growth.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice Maeterlinck offered a fascinating contribution to this range of
+discussion, in the course of which he said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> 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,&mdash;that other
+not quite so incomprehensible form of the twofold infinite mystery in
+which our whole life floats."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> persuade ourselves that an event which has not yet
+happened does not yet exist."</p>
+
+<p>The only explanation of certain phases of the phenomena of life is in
+the theory that life is twofold; that what we call life&mdash;in the sense of
+experiences and events and circumstances&mdash;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 <i>because</i> 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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 <i>for int&eacute;rieur</i>,&mdash;as the French have
+called it, with that profound intuition which we often discover in
+the etymology of words,&mdash;is a kind of <i>forum</i>, 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."</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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 <i>has</i> been, in the inner experience, <i>shall be</i>, in the
+outer experience. Mr. Maeterlinck says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> 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....</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="In_Proportion_to_Power" id="In_Proportion_to_Power"></a>In Proportion to Power.</div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"Lift up your hearts."</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"We lift them up unto the Lord."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> To feel
+that this ever-flowing current of events is something entirely outside
+one's own choice or volition is to stand helpless&mdash;if not
+hopeless&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> the feeblest, but we have
+all-powerful action on that which these events shall become in
+ourselves&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> meet on
+the highway of fate.... Events seem as the watch for the signal we hoist
+from within."</p>
+
+<p>The inner life that is lived&mdash;the life of thought, purpose, aspiration,
+and prayer&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"In man," says Balzac, "culminates a visible finite universe; in him
+begins a universe invisible and infinite,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The subjective or subliminal self is capable of extending the mental
+faculties in a way almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> of sustaining an existence independent of the
+body. It never dies. It is the living soul."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;the <i>raison d'&ecirc;tre</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_ETHEREAL_REALM" id="THE_ETHEREAL_REALM"></a>THE ETHEREAL REALM.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;"><span class="smcap">&mdash;Sir William Crookes</span>.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>We exist also in a world of ether;&mdash;that is to say, we are
+constructed to respond to a system of laws,&mdash;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,&mdash;as in perceiving the "X rays" we
+recognise in a way less conspicuous,&mdash;the pervading influence of
+ethereal vibrations which in range and variety far transcend our
+capacity of response.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Within, beyond, the world of ether,&mdash;as a still profounder, still
+more generalized aspect of the Cosmos,&mdash;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 <b>metetherial</b>
+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 <b>there</b>; but I well
+believe that beyond the ether there must be not one stage only, but
+countless stages in the infinity of things.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;"><span class="smcap">&mdash;Human Personality</span>.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The glorious consummation toward which organic evolution is tending
+is the production of the highest and most perfect psychical
+life.&mdash;<span class="smcap">John Fiske</span>.</p></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the most intense potency in the universe&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;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,&mdash;all by the quality of the thought he sends forth.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Still the further problem confronts us: How shall we consciously and
+intelligently control<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> 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&mdash;come. One asks for
+them&mdash;and they do not come? Now how are we to pluck out the heart of the
+mystery?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>ened by living in its
+native atmosphere of spiritual life,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is a question of degree,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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,&mdash;for it is the next step in spiritual advancement.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="A_Scientific_Fact" id="A_Scientific_Fact"></a>A Scientific Fact.</div>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;not the ghostland
+cultivated by a heated imagination, but a real communication from a
+distance, based on true physical laws."</p>
+
+<p>Yet even this speculation fails to keep pace<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Sir William Preece, in a recent address before the Royal Society,
+remarked:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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 <i>rapport</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>In the end telepathy will take entire precedence of all other forms of
+communication. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;trifles
+of no importance in themselves, but very curious in their
+combination&mdash;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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I talk to you incessantly. I find currents from my life continually
+running out like telegraph wires to yours."</p>
+
+<p>And a letter written by the other person, crossing this one on the way,
+had borne a message something to the effect:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;spirit to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> spirit&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>In this phase of actual experience may we not find a hint from which to
+study the words of Jesus to his disciples,&mdash;"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="A_Glorious_Inauguration" id="A_Glorious_Inauguration"></a>A Glorious Inauguration.</div>
+
+<p>The new year of 1903 was inaugurated by the scientific success of the
+most remarkable, the most marvellous achievement of any age,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> 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,&mdash;as ice-water, steam, and vapor
+are only different degrees and conditions of the same element. Progress
+is the transformation of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>If telepathy is "the science of the soul's interchange with God&mdash;of the
+interchange of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;his
+chief concern being, not the loss of his soul, but the gain of the
+pottage. He has been willing to exchange the entire<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> devotion of all his
+energies for a finer and more resplendent quality of food, clothing, and
+shelter,&mdash;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,&mdash;"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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> although less obviously,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;changes without contradiction of the past conceptions."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"It was a definite promise of God that He should unfold, develop,
+spiritualize the concep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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,&mdash;'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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>talk in thought</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Leavenworth of the State University Observatory in Minnesota
+photographed the new<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> asteroid Eros at a distance estimated to be some
+thirty-six millions of miles,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"I tell you we are fooled by the eye, the ear;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">These organs muffle as from that real world</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">That lies about us."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Yet in every human being there lies latent the inner sight and the inner
+hearing, which can be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> 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&mdash;moving without visible means&mdash;would have been
+regarded as a miracle a century ago. There is no hard and fast line
+between the phys<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> while viewed in the external way in which we
+alone can view it&mdash;while seen as a product and not as a plan&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="Finer_Cosmic_Forces" id="Finer_Cosmic_Forces"></a>Finer Cosmic Forces.</div>
+
+<p>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 Mus&eacute;e 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,&mdash;the carriage itself mounted on four
+great wheels, two of which are very large, with the two front ones
+smaller,&mdash;the entire vehicle occupying about twice the space of a modern
+conveyance, and its weight<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> 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,&mdash;not merely with the modern carriage, but with the flying
+automobile,&mdash;one realizes, indeed, the evolution in the methods of local
+transportation.</p>
+
+<p>Again, let one compare the traditions of the sailing vessels on which
+passengers crossed to Europe within the memory of men still living,&mdash;the
+forty days' passage between Boston and Liverpool which is well within
+the memory of Doctor Hale,&mdash;with the passage on this latest floating
+palace of the ocean, the Kaiser Wilhelm II.,&mdash;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&mdash;and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"It is this principle which Doctor Albertson sought to make use of&mdash;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!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;the physical and the psychical,&mdash;the subtle and finer
+forces are being utilized, and the horizon line of the unknown
+continually recedes before the progress of man.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Oliver Lodge, LL.D., presented a new phase of the problem of
+personality in an address<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> in London, in the following statement of a
+speculative belief:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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&mdash;an individualized, a definite portion&mdash;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.'</p>
+
+<p>"Imagination in science is permissible, provided one's imaginations
+are not treated as fact, or even theory, but only as working
+hypotheses,&mdash;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&mdash;the other,
+the greater part of us&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> a fraction exposed to sun and air and observation: the
+rest&mdash;by far the greater bulk&mdash;submerged and occasionally in
+subliminal contact, while still their peaks, their visible peaks,
+were far separate."</p></div>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;which is far more the true self than is the lower and
+lesser manifestation,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> life. That is, the individual has two lives
+not precisely corresponding in chronological sequence. The experiences
+of the day are his because, <i>before the day has dawned</i>, 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, <i>because</i> 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,&mdash;even that which we call the physical, being
+but the cruder and denser quality of the spiritual,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Of telepathy Doctor Lodge says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>Will this theory furnish the basis for a true interpretation of
+telepathy?</p>
+
+<p>The relations between the individual and the forces of the ethereal
+realm are also determining as regards health.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="Health_and_Happiness" id="Health_and_Happiness"></a>Health and Happiness.</div>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Professor John D. Quackenbos has recently said of Hypnotism:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Investigations extending over many years have led me to a belief
+in the dual personality of man&mdash;that is, each human unit exists in
+two distinct states of superior consciousness. One of these states
+is called the primary or superliminal consciousness,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"It happens to be a fact of mind that in sleep&mdash;natural or
+induced&mdash;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 <i>rapport</i>
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> superior parts, possibly with all well-wishing
+extra-human intelligences."</p></div>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the initial step is that of clearly realizing&mdash;of holding the
+luminous conception&mdash;of one's self as a spiritual being in the psychical
+body, <i>temporarily inhabiting</i> a physical body,&mdash;a spiritual being using
+as its instrument a physical body so long as it is at work in the
+phys<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It also involves an intelligent care of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> 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.'"</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> the body or out of
+it, he could not say,&mdash;God only knows,&mdash;he was transported to the third
+Heaven and heard unutterable things."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"The spirit world around this world of sense</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Floats like an atmosphere...."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> 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,&mdash;the one aim to which all are tending,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+action on the spiritual side. A thought has the force of a deed, and
+there is a literal truth in the line,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"The good, though only thought, has life and breath;"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>and in Lowell's words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 13em;">"Ah! let us hope that to our praise</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 14em;">Good God not only reckons</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 13em;">The moments when we tread His ways,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 14em;">But when the spirit beckons."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">"&mdash;through the ages one increasing purpose runs,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;that of regeneration, of redemption&mdash;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 <i>substance</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> receive the Divine messages
+and to follow the Divine leadings.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="A_New_Force" id="A_New_Force"></a>A New Force.</div>
+
+<p>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
+<i>rapport</i> the suddenly apprehended riches of its own higher spiritual
+nature."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>All, however, that is done by the highest phase of hypnotism, as exerted
+by Doctor Quacken<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>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,&mdash;from sympathy and generous aims, and all the infinite power
+of the Divine world is at its service.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="The_Service_of_the_Gods" id="The_Service_of_the_Gods"></a>The Service of the Gods.</div>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"But we found out that the air and earth were full of Electricity, and
+always going our way&mdash;just the way we wanted to send. <i>Would he take a
+message?</i> Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do; would carry it in
+no time. Only one doubt occurred one staggering objection&mdash;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&mdash;and it went like a charm.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>It is not only humanity&mdash;civilization&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> are easily and instantly subject to the infinite and irresistible
+potency of the will brought to bear upon them.</p>
+
+<p>On the threshold of any endeavor when one takes account of his
+possessions and conditions,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"There are points from which we may command our life,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">When the soul sweeps the future like a glass,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">And coming things, full freighted with our fate,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Jut out on the dark offing of the mind."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"... by the Vision splendid</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Is on his way attended,"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>he must give heed to the vision or it vanishes and returns no more.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"All is waste and worthless till</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Arrives the wise selecting will,"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In one of the most wonderful creations of Vedder, the artist shows us
+the figure of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> 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 <i>can</i> do
+that which he <i>desires</i> to do. The desire has only to be intensified
+into conscious, intelligent choice, into absolute will,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_POWER_OF_THE_EXALTED_MOMENT" id="THE_POWER_OF_THE_EXALTED_MOMENT"></a>THE POWER OF THE EXALTED MOMENT.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The salvation of Christ is the complete occupation of the human
+life by the divine life."</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>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.</i>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Phillips Brooks</span>.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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&mdash;days of monotony, of trial, of
+commonplace work under commonplace conditions, amid commonplace people
+and events&mdash;are yet to fashion and fulfil. These are the material,&mdash;the
+ordinary events, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;though
+all these be obscured in what may seem a total eclipse,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> "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&mdash;perhaps in all&mdash;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,&mdash;What do they mean? What value shall I give to those
+transformation experiences?"</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"Delayed, it may be, for more lives yet,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Through worlds I shall traverse&mdash;not a few,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">With much to learn and much to forget"&mdash;</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>ere the golden hour of fulfilment shall come; but faith in the exalted
+moment is but another name for faith in God.</p>
+
+<p>The great truth of life&mdash;that which we may well hold as its central and
+controlling and dominating truth&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>ous; nevertheless, afterward it
+yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness unto them which are
+exercised thereby."</p>
+
+<p>"It was given unto me," wrote Dante in the <i>Vita Nuova</i>, "to behold a
+very wonderful vision; wherein I saw things that determined me."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;which is the explanation of the outward phenomena whose
+significance, on the spiritual side, is all condensed in prayer&mdash;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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"There is an elemental essence&mdash;a strange living essence&mdash;which
+surrounds us on every side, and which is singularly susceptible to
+the influence of human thought.</p>
+
+<p>"This essence responds with the most wonderful delicacy to the
+faintest action of our minds or desires,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> and this being so, it is
+interesting to note how it is affected when the human mind
+formulates a definite, purposeful thought or wish."</p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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,&mdash;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."</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Leadbeater continues:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Still more pregnant of results for good or evil are a man's
+thought about other people, for in that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> 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&mdash;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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;judged by the data reached by scholars and thinkers, by
+psycholo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>gists and scientists&mdash;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&mdash;or another person&mdash;into new and different outward phases and
+circumstances is most true.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;gifts that the gods provide.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>It chanced to the writer of these papers to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> Phillips Brooks seemed to write themselves on
+the air:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="Obey_the_Vision" id="Obey_the_Vision"></a>Obey the Vision.</div>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;which winds in and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> out of the passes, on and on, and leads to a
+definite place at last,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>No,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;one might almost, indeed, say that it is made the test of
+our national life to a far greater degree than in any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> other country.
+The elements are well defined in Emerson's phrase of "the <i>flowing</i>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> 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. <i>Noblesse oblige</i> is
+the watchword of modern life.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"Success in thyself, which is best of all."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>ners,"&mdash;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,&mdash;these are the powers and achievements that tend to the true and
+only success,&mdash;the success of character.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>And they who have gone behind the curtain come forth and minister to
+him. He is aware of the courage of companionship.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 14em;">"'Mortal,' they softly say,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">'Peace to thy heart.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 14em;">We, too, yes, mortal,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Have been as thou art.'"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Voices unheard by the outer ear speak to the soul; presences unseen by
+the eye are yet felt, giving their sympathy and stimulus.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="The_Open_Door" id="The_Open_Door"></a>The Open Door.</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> opportunity that, if one
+fail to accept it, vanishes, to leave all the remainder of life "bound
+in shallows and in miseries."</p>
+
+<p>There is something about hesitation and reconsiderations that is
+curiously fatal to successful achievement. Good fortune is in going
+on,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> 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,&mdash;to cast all
+things behind in the insatiable thirst for divine communications. A
+purer fame, a greater power, rewards the sacrifice."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+Progress lies in a successive series of new conditions. Let one give all
+and ask for nothing,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="Interruptions_as_Opportunities" id="Interruptions_as_Opportunities"></a>Interruptions as Opportunities.</div>
+
+<p>"To work, to help and to be helped, to learn sympathy through suffering,
+to learn faith by perplexity, to reach truth through wonder,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> 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&mdash;that of
+opportunities? One has, perhaps, his theories and his convictions
+regarding the service of humanity. He holds it to be a duty,&mdash;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-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>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, "<i>As ye
+have therefore opportunity</i>, ... do good unto all men." Do not the
+interruptions assume a new form, and are they not, thereby, transfigured
+into glad and golden opportunity?</p>
+
+<p>And it is the will of God,&mdash;that great, resistless, and unceasing force,
+working underneath all our human wills&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> invites
+sympathetic comprehension and the enlargement of friendly relations. And
+as for one's time,&mdash;even in a full and busy life,&mdash;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&mdash;in any true sense&mdash;as
+we are filled with the heavenly magnetism. "Thou hast made<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> 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 <i>are</i> "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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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,&mdash;by substantiating the whole of his system to the Divine
+Central Will, whose seat is in the soul,&mdash;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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>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&mdash;as absurd as they are false&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> industrious in a continual procession of interruptions, there is
+something, too, to be said on the side of another&mdash;and a very genuine
+sort of wonder-working,&mdash;to transmute these interruptions into
+opportunities.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> are things that cannot be cured,&mdash;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 <i>casus belli</i> of the matter. Nothing is ever
+helped by irritation over it,&mdash;even the irritation of generosity and
+love, which seeks only the good of the other.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> own a burden with complaint and reproach? By no
+means. Let it pass. It is a part of his individuality, and cannot&mdash;at
+the moment, at least&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="The_Charm_of_Companionship" id="The_Charm_of_Companionship"></a>The Charm of Companionship.</div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> 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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> of social
+enjoyment. When one comes to that&mdash;it is quite another matter.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Companionship is the inflorescence of social life,&mdash;its finest result,
+its most exquisite and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>is</i> his brother's keeper&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> crisis,&mdash;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 <i>not</i> true; and he reflects that other days are coming, when,
+perhaps, by some divine dispensation, the depressed caller will <i>not</i>
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> 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?"</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>is</i> a real human need. "Treat
+the people as if they were real," said Emerson; "perhaps they are so."
+And so he becomes the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> 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 <i>may</i>
+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,&mdash;not energy, purpose,
+will,&mdash;but, instead, external conditions in which they may more
+luxuriously enjoy their romantic languor and their comforting
+consciousness of superior qualities.</p>
+
+<p>Now is it not more than an open question that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> 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&mdash;and mistakes it for
+being aroused&mdash;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&mdash;an abstract thing, at best&mdash;to see me, who needs
+an immediate infusion of encouragement?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And the tragedy of this is that the worker, who is true to his own
+purpose,&mdash;through good report or through ill report,&mdash;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,&mdash;and who
+receives her pages of outpouring back by return mail with a note,
+however courteous, expressing his inability to fulfil this
+commission,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Is there not, then, a need for the gospel of one's own endeavor? that a
+given line of work,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> plainly revealed in hours of mystic communion with
+the Divine, indicated by the subtle trend of circumstance and
+condition,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p><hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="A_Summer_Pilgrimage_in_Arizona" id="A_Summer_Pilgrimage_in_Arizona"></a>A Summer Pilgrimage in Arizona.</div>
+
+<p>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 Ca&ntilde;on
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The term "ca&ntilde;on" 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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 <i>ensemble</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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 Ca&ntilde;on 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> 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 Ca&ntilde;on
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> 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....</p>
+
+<p>"Not the most fervid pictures of a poet's fancy could transcend the
+glories revealed in the depths of the Ca&ntilde;on; inky shadows, pale gildings
+of lofty spires, golden splendors of sun beating full on fa&ccedil;ades 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."</p>
+
+<p>The language is not yet invented that can suggest any adequate idea of
+the Grand Ca&ntilde;on. Nor can it be painted or photographed, or in any way
+pictorially reproduced in a manner to afford any suggestion, even, of
+its sublimity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Formerly almost as inaccessible as the Himalayas, the Grand Ca&ntilde;on in
+Arizona can now be reached by the most luxurious methods of modern
+travelling. From Williams, on the Santa F&eacute; 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>chanted by beautiful views of
+the San Francisco mountains seen through a purple haze.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Flagstaff has no little arch&aelig;ological 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 Ca&ntilde;on,
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Ca&ntilde;on alone is worth a pilgrimage around the world to
+see,&mdash;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 ca&ntilde;on
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> from inscrutable gloom; dreams of
+mountains, as in their sleep they brood on things eternal."</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="A_Tragic_Idyl_of_Colorado" id="A_Tragic_Idyl_of_Colorado"></a>A Tragic Idyl of Colorado.</div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">I hung my verses in the wind,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Time and tide their faults may find.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">All were winnowed through and through,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Five lines lasted sound and true;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Five were smelted in a pot</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Than the South more fierce and hot;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">These the siroc could not melt,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Fire their fiercer flaming felt,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">And the meaning was more white</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Than July's meridian light.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Nor time unmake what poets know.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Have you eyes to find the five</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Which five hundred did survive?</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 20em;"><span class="smcap">&mdash;Emerson.</span></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a city of beautiful ideals, of high purposes, of temperance,
+educa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Over the range is another world&mdash;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&mdash;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!"</p></div>
+
+<p>This indescribable ecstasy of the Colorado air communicated itself to
+Mr. Meeker. He went<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> 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&mdash;now mid-way
+between two state capitols&mdash;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&mdash;for its founder&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> of
+sacrifice, and she, too, embraced his new enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>"Go ahead," replied Mr. Greeley, when Mr. Meeker mentioned his new
+project, "the 'Tribune' will back you."</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>In the spring of 1870 the seven hundred members of Union Colony, with
+their families, arrived.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Meeker further stipulated:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>He added: "I make the point that two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> as the world stands will be a centre of
+intelligence and activity."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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"&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>The Honorable Alva Adams of Pueblo, Colorado, ex-Governor of the state,
+writing of Nathan Cook Meeker, said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> where, for twenty-three days,
+until rescued by General Adams, they endured unspeakable sufferings, and
+the agency buildings and their contents were burned.</p>
+
+<p>To the awful spectacle of her husband's mutilated body, his wife&mdash;a
+woman of gentle birth and breeding&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 ca&ntilde;on,
+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,&mdash;her
+husband's murdered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> body left alone on the ground; her daughter snatched
+from her arms; her home in smoking ruins behind her,&mdash;so remarkable is
+her character in its religious exaltation, that even in this hour of
+supreme agony she could say, "<i>Though He slay me</i>, yet will I trust in
+Him!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>flowered
+alfalfa, the tragic scene seemed to rise again and impressed its
+lesson,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;with a natural gift full of
+spontaneous music.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"Say not the struggle naught availeth."</span></p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>falteringly, even unto death,
+did Nathan Cook Meeker keep faith with those ideals that revealed
+themselves to him.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;Pilate or Christ?
+Lincoln had to die that the nation might live. Heroism is forever being
+crowned with martyrdom.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="A_Remarkable_Mystic" id="A_Remarkable_Mystic"></a>A Remarkable Mystic.</div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The only affections which live eternally are those of the
+soul&mdash;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....<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>In 1881 Doctor Kingsford delivered in London, before drawing-room
+audiences, comprising representatives of literature, art, fashion, and
+the peerage,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> 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,&mdash;thus does one gain full access to the stores of knowledge in the
+soul. Doctor Kingsford further explains:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> in virtue of the
+soul's position between the worlds of substance and of phenomenon,
+and her consequent ability to refer <i>things</i> to their essential
+<i>ideas</i>, 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 <i>man</i> 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 <i>with the
+eyes of God</i>....</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> belongs of right to man in his highest and
+completest measure of development."</p></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>only through his own voluntary</i> co-operation with the Spirit."</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Kingsford regarded Jesus as a spiritual Ideal and an Eternal
+Verity, and Religion as an ever-present actuality.</p>
+
+<p>We find her saying:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> 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,&mdash;as it well may to its own real
+advantage,&mdash;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."</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="The_Momentous_Question" id="The_Momentous_Question"></a>The Momentous Question.</div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The question for man most momentous of all is whether or no he has
+an immortal soul; or&mdash;to avoid the word immortal, which belongs to
+the realm of infinities&mdash;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&mdash;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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"She felt it die a little every day,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Flutter more wildly and more feebly pray."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>The soul has certainly a door into infinite beauty, and through the
+portals must it fare<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>This investigation&mdash;pursued in many ways&mdash;is best of all pursued in
+keeping some hour apart, each day, for absolute <i>re</i>union and
+<i>com</i>munion 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>who was willing to
+encounter anything</i>." This alone is the diviner quality of love,&mdash;to be
+willing to "encounter anything;"&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>One may tread,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> 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 <i>know</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>One of the great discourses of Phillips Brooks had for its theme the
+lesson of not laying too<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> 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 <i>for</i> joy until he can live
+well <i>without</i> joy. It is the law and the prophets.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_NECTAR_OF_THE_HOUR" id="THE_NECTAR_OF_THE_HOUR"></a>THE NECTAR OF THE HOUR.</h2>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">I share the good with every flower,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">I drink the nectar of the hour.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 25em;"><span class="smcap">&mdash;Emerson</span>.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>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.</i>&mdash;<span class="smcap">The Rev. J. P. De Caussade</span>, in "Holy Abandonment."</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The moment we desire God and His will, that moment we enjoy them,
+and our enjoyment corresponds to the order of our desires."</p></div>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 14em;">What though the bough beneath thee break?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 14em;">Remember, thou hast wings.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 24em;"><span class="smcap">&mdash;Victor Hugo</span>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"I share the good with every flower,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">I drink the nectar of the hour."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The little book from which the extract on the preceding page is taken&mdash;a
+Catholic book of devotion&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;regardless of sect or creed.</p>
+
+<p>A French priest, preaching in an impassioned and sublime abandon of
+enthusiasm; caught up in a rapture of the heavenly life, poured<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>The entire discourse was a fervent and illuminating illustration of how
+God's will reveals itself through the most common things. "O Divine
+Action," P&egrave;re De Caussade exclaims,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> "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."</p>
+
+<p>These words invest the truth of the constant revelation of God's will
+through ordinary events, with a burning intensity and vividness that
+can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> hardly fail to leave a permanent impress upon the reader.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>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,&mdash;the one most invaluable to human life,&mdash;absolute trust in God?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In the marvellous sermons of P&egrave;re 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 P&egrave;re De Caussade&mdash;one equally entitled to
+consideration&mdash;is that God reveals himself to us now, in ordinary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>
+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 P&egrave;re 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."</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">"Thou speakest, Lord, to all mankind by general events.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">Thou speakest to each one in particular by the events of his</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">every moment."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>P&egrave;re De Caussade proceeds to say:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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,&mdash;do these words merit nothing?"</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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 <i>love</i> this
+leading.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;could he but recognize all this as the divine language and meet
+it,&mdash;not only with resignation but with that joyful acceptance of
+perfect faith which absolutely realizes the oneness of the will between
+himself and God,&mdash;then would not life gain, at once, immeasurably in
+peace and happiness?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Can the divine will err?" questions P&egrave;re 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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>The life of faith, that perfect faith which is perfect peace, consists
+in this ever-present recognition, and, tested by its results,&mdash;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,&mdash;tried by all those tests of actual experience, this attitude of
+perfect faith is the attitude most favorable to progress and
+achievement.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span></p><hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="A_Profound_Experience" id="A_Profound_Experience"></a>A Profound Experience.</div>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;to be endured but not enjoyed, and limited chiefly
+to Lenten periods and the special holy days of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"My heart was heavy, for its trust had been</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">One summer Sabbath day I strolled among</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">The green mounds of the village burial-place;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">Where, pondering how all human love and hate</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">Find one sad level, and how, soon or late,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Wronged and wrong-doer, each with meekened face,</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 12em;">And cold hands folded over a still heart,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Pass the green threshold of our common grave,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Awed for myself, and pitying my race,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Our common sorrow, like a mighty wave,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Swept all my pride away, and trembling</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 14em;">I forgave!"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Forgiveness,&mdash;forgiveness in love, and in readiness to aid and to
+rejoice in all future success of the one who had erred,&mdash;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,&mdash;shall we not in these touch the
+<i>blessedness</i> 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Probably the one solution of the problem of life in all its intricacies
+and its perplexing and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> 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 P&egrave;re 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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;whatever
+may be,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>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&mdash;not the worst&mdash;of it. Mr.
+Longfellow's familiar lines,</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"Not enjoyment and not sorrow</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">Is our destined end or way;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">But to act, that each to-morrow</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">Find us further than to-day,"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">"'Mortal,' they softly say,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">'Peace to thy heart!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">We, too, yes, mortal,</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 12em;">Have been as thou art,</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Hope-lifted, doubt-depressed,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">Seeing in part;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 11em;">Tried, troubled, tempted,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">Sustained as thou art.'"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The spiritual faith and that courage and persistence of energy which is
+the fruition of faith,&mdash;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,"&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> and denials that are&mdash;for the most part&mdash;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,&mdash;it is, instead, in its integrity and its deep significance,
+fulfilled by the <i>joyful</i> acceptance of the leading, the <i>willing</i>
+surrender that opens a still wider view and a still more vital faith in
+the divine wisdom.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> of his individual problem to the divine plane of love.
+For love is the spiritual alchemy,&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;the whole philosophy, it
+may be&mdash;of life can be read in the counsel, "As ye have therefore
+opportunity, do good unto all men." Do good,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;that of not desiring any specific event or
+ful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>In a work entitled "Esoteric Christianity" by Annie Besant there is a
+chapter on prayer in which we find Mrs. Besant saying:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"In the invisible world there exist many kinds of Intelligences,
+which come into relationship with man,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> 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?&mdash;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."</p></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="The_Law_of_Prayer" id="The_Law_of_Prayer"></a>The Law of Prayer.</div>
+
+<p>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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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,&mdash;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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;the one that includes all others,&mdash;that of union
+with God.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Anxiety and misgiving," wrote F&eacute;nelon, "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&mdash;that is enough; but to listen one must be silent,
+and to follow one must yield."</p>
+
+<p>The quiet and perfect obedience to the divine will, taught by F&eacute;nelon,
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> 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&mdash;the absolutely invincible power&mdash;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&mdash;a force infinitely more potent
+than electricity&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The very pain and trial and multiplying obstacles that one may encounter
+who definitely sets his steps along a certain way, are only helps,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> 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&mdash;which is simply clairvoyant
+vision&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> 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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> will be done," as if it were the most
+sorrowful, instead of the most joyful, petition.</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"I see a Spirit by thy side,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Purple-winged and eagle-eyed,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Looking like a heavenly guide.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Though he seems so bright and fair,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Ere thou trust his proffered care,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Pause a little, and beware!</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">If he bid thee dwell apart,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Tending some ideal smart</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">In a sick and coward heart;</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">In self-worship wrapped alone,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Dreaming thy poor griefs are grown</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">More than other men have known;</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Though his words seem true and wise,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Soul, I say to thee, Arise,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">He is a Demon in disguise!"</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is a phase in which one feels his own peculiar sorrow as the most
+unendurable of all. Perhaps it is&mdash;but one <i>must</i> 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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> period. It is
+the time in which to create on the spiritual side.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;in all humility&mdash;undeserved calamity; when
+he can simply accept it as an expression of the divine action that is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+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,&mdash;then, indeed, does he receive of the true ministry of pain.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> and
+paralyze all the energy that should express itself in achievements. But
+the secret of joy is hidden in pain.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"For what God deigns to try with sorrow</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">He means not to decay to-morrow;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">But through that fiery trial last</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">When earthly ties and bonds are past."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>An experience that receives this test must hold deep significance. Let
+one accept it,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> beauty, depth, and significance to this human
+life. It is only as one lives <i>divinely</i> that he lives at all,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="Conduct_and_Beauty" id="Conduct_and_Beauty"></a>Conduct and Beauty.</div>
+
+<p>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 <i>how</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;such is the strength and
+worth, in essentials, of their author's criticism of life,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>With the individual life, as with the star,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>It is in this manner alone that one may control his life,&mdash;not by the
+working of an instantaneous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> miracle, but by absolute fidelity to a
+definite ideal of progressive change.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">"Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">Your schemes, politics, fail, lines give way, substances mock and</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">elude me,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-poss'd soul, eludes not,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">One's self must never give way&mdash;that is the final substance&mdash;that out</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">of all is sure,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">When shows break up what but one's self is sure?"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The "quicksand years" whirl away many things. Schemes dissolve and
+vanish; new combinations constantly arise; every day is, indeed, a new
+beginning, and</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"Every morn is the world made new."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">"Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">When shows break up, what but one's self is sure?"</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"I know not what the future hath</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17em;">Of marvel and surprise,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">Assured alone that life and death</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 17em;">His mercy underlies."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>
+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 <i>shall</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 7em;">"One's self must never give way&mdash;that is the final substance."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="The_Divine_Panorama" id="The_Divine_Panorama"></a>The Divine Panorama.</div>
+
+<p>"Do we not all wish that we could live our lives over again in the light
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> our present experience?" remarked Rev. Doctor Charles Gordon Ames;
+"but this is just what God lets us do."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>
+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&mdash;indeed he will, and he inevitably
+must&mdash;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,&mdash;as "the
+triumph's evidence,"&mdash;ill fortune can establish no dominant power over
+his life. That things have gone wrong is only, after all, a proof that
+they <i>may</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> 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,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 17em;">"&mdash;God sets for you</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">A fair clean page to write anew</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">The lesson blotted hitherto,"&mdash;</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>a new day may be a new lifetime as well as that "next life" beyond the
+change we call death.</p>
+
+<p>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. <i>Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in
+the year.</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>ing:
+to-day 't is inconceivably populous; creation swarms and meliorates."</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>lay hold</i> 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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span>
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> 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 <i>laid hold</i> 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>Here we have the initial truth. The acquirement of "sufficient
+concentration and steadiness to survive the dissolution of the
+flesh,"&mdash;<i>and</i> "to assert an individuality untrammelled by the
+limitations of the present life,"&mdash;when man has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> progressed so far as
+this, then, and then alone, has he <i>achieved</i> 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"&mdash;which is merely
+another phrase for spirituality&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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,&mdash;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."</p></div>
+
+<p>But the question recurs just here, Is there absolutely no possibility of
+immortality for him who does not advance beyond a certain conscious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> 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&mdash;the divine spark, implanted by God, when he made man in
+His image,&mdash;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 <i>may be</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span></p><hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><a name="Also_the_Holy_Ghost" id="Also_the_Holy_Ghost"></a>Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.</div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> and faith, as <i>the substance</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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. <i>Now</i> is the day of salvation. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The discoveries in nature are in a perfect correspondence with the
+advancing requirements of human life.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> 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....</p>
+
+<p>"... 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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>
+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,&mdash;there is
+no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,&mdash;that no honest seeking
+goes unrewarded.... All power," he adds, "is of one kind; a sharing of
+the nature of the world."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>
+decades, ago. That which we call life&mdash;environment, circumstances,
+conditions&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Science is demonstrating the actual existence of another world,
+transcending, pervading, surrounding this one; a world which
+interpenetrates our own,&mdash;the ethereal in the atmospheric,&mdash;and there is
+one part of the personality of man that dwells continually on this
+ethereal side. The physical body only conveys a partial<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>In this ethereal world,&mdash;which interpenetrates our atmosphere and in
+which the higher part of man's being continually dwells,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Browning has a line in "Aurora Leigh" that runs,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">"And having tried all other ways, to just try God's."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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&mdash;the
+heart of himself,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>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
+<i>without</i> joy. It is the law and the prophets.</p>
+
+<p>One may tread,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> and sorrow, one shall come to <i>know</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>It is the complete recognition of that invincible aid given to the soul
+through the "ever-present" aid of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;the divine life,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"I thank whatever gods there be</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">For my unconquerable soul,"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>sings William Ernest Henley, and he closes with the ringing lines,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">"I am the Captain of my fate,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">I am the master of my soul."</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And Emerson and Henley are right&mdash;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&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> 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?"</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> heart of human activities.
+It is in the resistless tide of daily affairs,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> ideal achievement; of entering into that golden
+atmosphere in which he shall not only</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">"&mdash;dream of summers and dream of flowers</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">That last alway,"</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>but find, in an ever-increasing degree, that the dream is merged into
+the profoundest reality of experience.</p>
+
+<p>"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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;even the prayerful and reverent
+reader&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;what has <i>it</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>If this be true of resignation, what shall be said of tribulation,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> 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,&mdash;well or ill, as
+may be,&mdash;it must be done. Shall he, <i>can</i> he, "glory"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> in this
+paralyzing pain and torture that so mysteriously has fallen upon
+him,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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 <i>feel</i> this, in
+every fibre of his nature, is to "glory" in the tribulation. It is to
+extract its best meaning, and to go on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> in life better equipped than
+before. "The tests of life are to <i>make</i> and not <i>break</i> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>at hand</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> 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,&mdash;even the Life Radiant.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span></p><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Abbott, Rev. Dr. Lyman, <a href='#Page_83'><b>83</b></a>, <a href='#Page_223'><b>223</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Academy of Science, <a href='#Page_10'><b>10</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Adams, Hon. Alva, his tribute to Nathan Cook Meeker, <a href='#Page_248'><b>248</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash;, General, <a href='#Page_250'><b>250</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Africa, <a href='#Page_230'><b>230</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Albertson, Dr., his invention, <a href='#Page_151'><b>151</b></a>, <a href='#Page_152'><b>152</b></a>, <a href='#Page_153'><b>153</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Altar of Perpetual Adoration, <a href='#Page_19'><b>19</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ames, Dr. Charles Gordon, his uplifting sermons, <a href='#Page_223'><b>223</b></a>, <a href='#Page_322'><b>322</b></a>, <a href='#Page_324'><b>324</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Andes, the, <a href='#Page_125'><b>125</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Arizona, <a href='#Page_205'><b>205</b></a>, <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Armstrong, Gen. Samuel Chapman, <a href='#Page_247'><b>247</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Arno, the, <a href='#Page_251'><b>251</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Arnold, Sir Edwin, <a href='#Page_65'><b>65</b></a>, <a href='#Page_68'><b>68</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash;, Matthew, <a href='#Page_198'><b>198</b></a>, <a href='#Page_313'><b>313</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Atlantic, the, <a href='#Page_125'><b>125</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; cable, <a href='#Page_116'><b>116</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; coast, <a href='#Page_92'><b>92</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Aurora Leigh," <a href='#Page_345'><b>345</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Austrian, <a href='#Page_135'><b>135</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Avernus, <a href='#Page_51'><b>51</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ayrton, Prof. W. E., <a href='#Page_124'><b>124</b></a>, <a href='#Page_126'><b>126</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Babcock, Rev. Dr. Maltbie Davenport, his noble words, <a href='#Page_359'><b>359</b></a>, <a href='#Page_360'><b>360</b></a>, <a href='#Page_363'><b>363</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Balzac, Honor&eacute; de, <a href='#Page_103'><b>103</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Banquo," <a href='#Page_253'><b>253</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Baptist belief, <a href='#Page_169'><b>169</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Beethoven, <a href='#Page_228'><b>228</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Behmen, Jacob, <a href='#Page_255'><b>255</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Besant, Annie, her theories on Prayer, <a href='#Page_298'><b>298</b></a>, <a href='#Page_299'><b>299</b></a>, <a href='#Page_300'><b>300</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bible, the, <a href='#Page_126'><b>126</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bonus, John, <a href='#Page_256'><b>256</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Boston, <a href='#Page_150'><b>150</b></a>, <a href='#Page_234'><b>234</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Brewster, Elder, <a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Bright Angel Trail, The," <a href='#Page_233'><b>233</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">British Isles, <a href='#Page_142'><b>142</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Brooks, Rt. Rev. Dr. Phillips, <a href='#Page_31'><b>31</b></a>, <a href='#Page_53'><b>53</b></a>, <a href='#Page_62'><b>62</b></a>, <a href='#Page_183'><b>183</b></a>, <a href='#Page_192'><b>192</b></a>, <a href='#Page_204'><b>204</b></a>, <a href='#Page_267'><b>267</b></a>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;"><a href='#Page_268'><b>268</b></a>, <a href='#Page_293'><b>293</b></a>, <a href='#Page_347'><b>347</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, <a href='#Page_345'><b>345</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash;, Robert, <a href='#Page_265'><b>265</b></a>, <a href='#Page_364'><b>364</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bunsen, Dr. Robert Wilhelm, <a href='#Page_337'><b>337</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bushnell, Rev. Dr. Horace, <a href='#Page_351'><b>351</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Cache la Poudre, <a href='#Page_244'><b>244</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Carboniferous, <a href='#Page_229'><b>229</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Centennial Exhibition, the, <a href='#Page_245'><b>245</b></a>, <a href='#Page_246'><b>246</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Chemical Society, <a href='#Page_48'><b>48</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Cheyenne, <a href='#Page_240'><b>240</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; Ca&ntilde;on, <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>, <a href='#Page_232'><b>232</b></a>, <a href='#Page_233'><b>233</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Chicago, <a href='#Page_93'><b>93</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Christmas, <a href='#Page_242'><b>242</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Clothed with the Sun," <a href='#Page_255'><b>255</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Colorado River, <a href='#Page_230'><b>230</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash;, State of, <a href='#Page_191'><b>191</b></a>, <a href='#Page_237'><b>237</b></a>, <a href='#Page_238'><b>238</b></a>, <a href='#Page_239'><b>239</b></a>, <a href='#Page_240'><b>240</b></a>, <a href='#Page_242'><b>242</b></a>, <a href='#Page_243'><b>243</b></a>, <a href='#Page_244'><b>244</b></a>, <a href='#Page_245'><b>245</b></a>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;"><a href='#Page_246'><b>246</b></a>, <a href='#Page_247'><b>247</b></a>, <a href='#Page_248'><b>248</b></a>, <a href='#Page_251'><b>251</b></a>, <a href='#Page_252'><b>252</b></a>, <a href='#Page_253'><b>253</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Columbia University Chemical Society, <a href='#Page_48'><b>48</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Congress, <a href='#Page_246'><b>246</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Connecticut, <a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Cooper Institute, <a href='#Page_240'><b>240</b></a>, <a href='#Page_243'><b>243</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Copley Square, <a href='#Page_169'><b>169</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Cosmos, the, <a href='#Page_140'><b>140</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Courier Journal," <a href='#Page_238'><b>238</b></a>, <a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Crookes, Sir William, <a href='#Page_9'><b>9</b></a>, <a href='#Page_11'><b>11</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Crusaders, the, <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Culture," <a href='#Page_198'><b>198</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Curie, Professor, Radium discovered by, <a href='#Page_9'><b>9</b></a>, <a href='#Page_10'><b>10</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash;, Madame, <a href='#Page_9'><b>9</b></a>, <a href='#Page_10'><b>10</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Cushing, Frank, <a href='#Page_235'><b>235</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Daniel, Book of, <a href='#Page_163'><b>163</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Daniel Deronda," <a href='#Page_222'><b>222</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dante, <a href='#Page_185'><b>185</b></a>, <a href='#Page_309'><b>309</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Data of Ethics," <a href='#Page_204'><b>204</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Darwin, Dr. Charles, <a href='#Page_83'><b>83</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">De Caussade, P&egrave;re, <a href='#Page_275'><b>275</b></a>, <a href='#Page_280'><b>280</b></a>, <a href='#Page_281'><b>281</b></a>, <a href='#Page_284'><b>284</b></a>, <a href='#Page_290'><b>290</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Denver, <a href='#Page_240'><b>240</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, <a href='#Page_251'><b>251</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Discovery of the Future, <a href='#Page_81'><b>81</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Donald, Rev. Dr. E. Winchester, <a href='#Page_223'><b>223</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Divine Creation, <a href='#Page_171'><b>171</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; Love, <a href='#Page_206'><b>206</b></a>, <a href='#Page_288'><b>288</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; Perfection, <a href='#Page_300'><b>300</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; Pressure, <a href='#Page_199'><b>199</b></a>, <a href='#Page_332'><b>332</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; Truth, <a href='#Page_286'><b>286</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; Word, <a href='#Page_314'><b>314</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; Will, <a href='#Page_89'><b>89</b></a>, <a href='#Page_294'><b>294</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Echo Cliffs, <a href='#Page_236'><b>236</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Edison, Thomas, <a href='#Page_116'><b>116</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Edwards, Jonathan, <a href='#Page_171'><b>171</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Egyptian, <a href='#Page_80'><b>80</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Eiffel Tower, <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Electricity, <a href='#Page_174'><b>174</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Eliot, President Charles W., <a href='#Page_198'><b>198</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Elizabeth, <a href='#Page_242'><b>242</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Emerson, Ralph Waldo, <a href='#Page_32'><b>32</b></a>, <a href='#Page_40'><b>40</b></a>, <a href='#Page_42'><b>42</b></a>, <a href='#Page_45'><b>45</b></a>, <a href='#Page_49'><b>49</b></a>, <a href='#Page_61'><b>61</b></a>, <a href='#Page_78'><b>78</b></a>, <a href='#Page_81'><b>81</b></a>, <a href='#Page_93'><b>93</b></a>, <a href='#Page_175'><b>175</b></a>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;"><a href='#Page_177'><b>177</b></a>, <a href='#Page_196'><b>196</b></a>, <a href='#Page_197'><b>197</b></a>, <a href='#Page_202'><b>202</b></a>, <a href='#Page_203'><b>203</b></a>, <a href='#Page_214'><b>214</b></a>, <a href='#Page_217'><b>217</b></a>, <a href='#Page_221'><b>221</b></a>, <a href='#Page_237'><b>237</b></a>, <a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a>, <a href='#Page_242'><b>242</b></a>, <a href='#Page_309'><b>309</b></a>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;"><a href='#Page_324'><b>324</b></a>, <a href='#Page_339'><b>339</b></a>, <a href='#Page_354'><b>354</b></a>, <a href='#Page_355'><b>355</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Empedocles, <a href='#Page_78'><b>78</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">England, <a href='#Page_256'><b>256</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Episcopalian, <a href='#Page_169'><b>169</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Eros, <a href='#Page_145'><b>145</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Esoteric Christianity," <a href='#Page_298'><b>298</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Europe, <a href='#Page_137'><b>137</b></a>, <a href='#Page_150'><b>150</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Evangeline," <a href='#Page_250'><b>250</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Evolution, <a href='#Page_330'><b>330</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Expansion of Religion," <a href='#Page_223'><b>223</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Faraday, Michael, <a href='#Page_338'><b>338</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Faust, <a href='#Page_49'><b>49</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">F&eacute;nelon, <a href='#Page_302'><b>302</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, <a href='#Page_68'><b>68</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Field, Cyrus, <a href='#Page_116'><b>116</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fiske, Dr. John, consummation of organic evolution, <a href='#Page_113'><b>113</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">degree of achievement above the level of death, <a href='#Page_327'><b>327</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Flagstaff, <a href='#Page_234'><b>234</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">cosmopolitan influence of, <a href='#Page_235'><b>235</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Florence, <a href='#Page_251'><b>251</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Foretelling of the future, <a href='#Page_24'><b>24</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fort Steele, <a href='#Page_249'><b>249</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Forum, The," article of Edward Everett Hale in, <a href='#Page_79'><b>79</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fuller, Margaret, defines social sympathies, <a href='#Page_217'><b>217</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Galilee, <a href='#Page_264'><b>264</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Garden of the Gods, <a href='#Page_242'><b>242</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">German, <a href='#Page_334'><b>334</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Giver of all Good," <a href='#Page_320'><b>320</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Goethe, <a href='#Page_198'><b>198</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Gogol, <a href='#Page_126'><b>126</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Gordon, Rev. Dr. George A., <a href='#Page_223'><b>223</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Grand Ca&ntilde;on of the Colorado, <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>, <a href='#Page_228'><b>228</b></a>, <a href='#Page_229'><b>229</b></a>, <a href='#Page_233'><b>233</b></a>, <a href='#Page_236'><b>236</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Greek, <a href='#Page_249'><b>249</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Greeley, Horace, presided at meeting in Cooper Institute, <a href='#Page_240'><b>240</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">invited Nathan Cook Meeker to place on "Tribune," <a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">encouraged founding of town, <a href='#Page_243'><b>243</b></a>, <a href='#Page_248'><b>248</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">portrait of, <a href='#Page_253'><b>253</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash;, town of, founded by Nathan Cook Meeker, <a href='#Page_237'><b>237</b></a>, <a href='#Page_240'><b>240</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">beautiful situation of, <a href='#Page_244'><b>244</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">interest of, <a href='#Page_245'><b>245</b></a>, <a href='#Page_247'><b>247</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"&mdash;&mdash;, Tribune, The," founding of, <a href='#Page_238'><b>238</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hale, Rev. Dr. Edward Everett, prediction of, <a href='#Page_79'><b>79</b></a>, <a href='#Page_80'><b>80</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">memory of, <a href='#Page_150'><b>150</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hall, General, writes of Nathan Cook Meeker, <a href='#Page_247'><b>247</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hamilton, Gail, <a href='#Page_42'><b>42</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Harris, Dr. William Torrey, <a href='#Page_190'><b>190</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Harvard, <a href='#Page_55'><b>55</b></a>, <a href='#Page_198'><b>198</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hayes, Hon. Rutherford B., appoints Nathan Cook Meeker Indian</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Commissioner, <a href='#Page_236'><b>236</b></a>, <a href='#Page_247'><b>247</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Heavenly Vision, <a href='#Page_302'><b>302</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Helbaicy, M. Tessier d', theory of, <a href='#Page_135'><b>135</b></a>, <a href='#Page_136'><b>136</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig, <a href='#Page_338'><b>338</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Henley, William Ernest, <a href='#Page_355'><b>355</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hilty, Carl, his ideas on Happiness, <a href='#Page_343'><b>343</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Himalayas, <a href='#Page_233'><b>233</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Holland, Canon Scott, discussions of, <a href='#Page_163'><b>163</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">arraigns modern teachings, <a href='#Page_164'><b>164</b></a>, <a href='#Page_165'><b>165</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">characterizes the ether, <a href='#Page_166'><b>166</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Holmes, Dr. Oliver Wendell, counsel of, <a href='#Page_47'><b>47</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Holy Spirit, the, <a href='#Page_280'><b>280</b></a>, <a href='#Page_331'><b>331</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Hope of Religion," <a href='#Page_223'><b>223</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hugo, Victor, lines of, <a href='#Page_273'><b>273</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Human Freedom," <a href='#Page_55'><b>55</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Human Personality," <a href='#Page_129'><b>129</b></a>, <a href='#Page_148'><b>148</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Humanity, <a href='#Page_221'><b>221</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Indian, the, <a href='#Page_247'><b>247</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Indian Commissioner, <a href='#Page_238'><b>238</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Indiana, <a href='#Page_205'><b>205</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Indians, legislation for, <a href='#Page_246'><b>246</b></a>, <a href='#Page_248'><b>248</b></a>, <a href='#Page_249'><b>249</b></a>, <a href='#Page_250'><b>250</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Isles of Patmos, <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Italy, <a href='#Page_257'><b>257</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jacob's ladder, <a href='#Page_298'><b>298</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">James, Prof. William, demonstration of, <a href='#Page_55'><b>55</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">depicts power of the Holy Spirit, <a href='#Page_331'><b>331</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jesus, <a href='#Page_277'><b>277</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Joule, Dr., <a href='#Page_338'><b>338</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Kaiser Wilhelm II., the, <a href='#Page_150'><b>150</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Kelvin, Lord, <a href='#Page_263'><b>263</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Kerchsoff, <a href='#Page_337'><b>337</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Kingsford, Dr. Anna, n&eacute;e Bonus, remarkable mystic writings of, <a href='#Page_255'><b>255</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">marriage of, <a href='#Page_256'><b>256</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">theories of, <a href='#Page_257'><b>257</b></a>, <a href='#Page_259'><b>259</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">remarkable interpretation of life of, <a href='#Page_261'><b>261</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lacordaire, P&egrave;re, <a href='#Page_229'><b>229</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lanier, Sidney, <a href='#Page_65'><b>65</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Latin, <a href='#Page_198'><b>198</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Leadbeater, C. W., <a href='#Page_186'><b>186</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Leavenworth, Professor, <a href='#Page_144'><b>144</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lent, <a href='#Page_285'><b>285</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Leverrier, Urbain John Joseph, <a href='#Page_84'><b>84</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Life Radiant, The," <a href='#Page_3'><b>3</b></a>, <a href='#Page_5'><b>5</b></a>, <a href='#Page_6'><b>6</b></a>, <a href='#Page_16'><b>16</b></a>, <a href='#Page_24'><b>24</b></a>, <a href='#Page_25'><b>25</b></a>. <a href='#Page_26'><b>26</b></a>, <a href='#Page_37'><b>37</b></a>, <a href='#Page_348'><b>348</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lincoln, Abraham <a href='#Page_7'><b>7</b></a>, <a href='#Page_254'><b>254</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Liverpool, <a href='#Page_150'><b>150</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lodge, Sir Oliver, <a href='#Page_9'><b>9</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">new problems presented, by, <a href='#Page_153'><b>153</b></a>, <a href='#Page_154'><b>154</b></a>, <a href='#Page_155'><b>155</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">his theories regarding telepathy, <a href='#Page_157'><b>157</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Loeb, Dr., <a href='#Page_25'><b>25</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">London, <a href='#Page_86'><b>86</b></a>, <a href='#Page_154'><b>154</b></a>, <a href='#Page_216'><b>216</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, <a href='#Page_292'><b>292</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Long's Peak, <a href='#Page_244'><b>244</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lot, <a href='#Page_202'><b>202</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Louis XV., <a href='#Page_149'><b>149</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lowell Institute, <a href='#Page_234'><b>234</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lowell, James Russell, <a href='#Page_170'><b>170</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash;, John, <a href='#Page_234'><b>234</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; Observatory, <a href='#Page_234'><b>234</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash;, Prof. Percival, his astronomical work, <a href='#Page_234'><b>234</b></a>, <a href='#Page_235'><b>235</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Maeterlinck, Maurice, the future discussed by, <a href='#Page_91'><b>91</b></a>, <a href='#Page_93'><b>93</b></a>, <a href='#Page_94'><b>94</b></a>, <a href='#Page_96'><b>96</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">theories of, <a href='#Page_98'><b>98</b></a>, <a href='#Page_101'><b>101</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">insights of, <a href='#Page_193'><b>193</b></a>, <a href='#Page_207'><b>207</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Magi, the, <a href='#Page_265'><b>265</b></a>, <a href='#Page_346'><b>346</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Marconi, Guglielmo, genius of, <a href='#Page_5'><b>5</b></a>, <a href='#Page_116'><b>116</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">system of, <a href='#Page_125'><b>125</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">ship detector of, <a href='#Page_134'><b>134</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">predictions of, fulfilled, <a href='#Page_136'><b>136</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Marie Antoinette, <a href='#Page_149'><b>149</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mars, <a href='#Page_127'><b>127</b></a>, <a href='#Page_234'><b>234</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Massachusetts, diocese of, <a href='#Page_54'><b>54</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash;, Bishop of, <a href='#Page_54'><b>54</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mayer, Julius Robert von, <a href='#Page_338'><b>338</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Meeker, Arvilla Delight, n&eacute;e Smith (Mrs. Nathan Cook Meeker), <a href='#Page_249'><b>249</b></a>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;"><a href='#Page_250'><b>250</b></a>, <a href='#Page_252'><b>252</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash;, Nathan Cook, town of Greeley, Colo., founded by, <a href='#Page_237'><b>237</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">visions of, <a href='#Page_238'><b>238</b></a>, <a href='#Page_239'><b>239</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">outlines plans, <a href='#Page_240'><b>240</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">birth of, <a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">editorial work of, praised by Emerson, <a href='#Page_242'><b>242</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">municipal principles of, <a href='#Page_243'><b>243</b></a>, <a href='#Page_244'><b>244</b></a>, <a href='#Page_245'><b>245</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">appointed commissioner to Centennial Exposition, <a href='#Page_246'><b>246</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">"The Greeley Tribune" founded by, <a href='#Page_246'><b>246</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Indian policy of, <a href='#Page_246'><b>246</b></a>, <a href='#Page_247'><b>247</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">difficulties encountered by, <a href='#Page_247'><b>247</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">massacre of, <a href='#Page_247'><b>247</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">estimation of, <a href='#Page_251'><b>251</b></a>, <a href='#Page_252'><b>252</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">work of, <a href='#Page_253'><b>253</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">noble ideals of, <a href='#Page_254'><b>254</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash;, Josephine, <a href='#Page_248'><b>248</b></a>, <a href='#Page_249'><b>249</b></a>, <a href='#Page_250'><b>250</b></a>, <a href='#Page_252'><b>252</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mesozoic age, <a href='#Page_229'><b>229</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Michael Angelo, <a href='#Page_228'><b>228</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mont Pel&eacute;e, <a href='#Page_48'><b>48</b></a>, <a href='#Page_50'><b>50</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Montana, <a href='#Page_205'><b>205</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Morning Star, <a href='#Page_204'><b>204</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mount Etna, <a href='#Page_78'><b>78</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; of Transfiguration, <a href='#Page_88'><b>88</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; of Vision, <a href='#Page_365'><b>365</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Moxom, Rev. Dr. Philip, <a href='#Page_223'><b>223</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">M&uuml;nsterberg, Prof. Hugo, <a href='#Page_55'><b>55</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mus&eacute;e Cluny, the, <a href='#Page_149'><b>149</b></a>, <a href='#Page_150'><b>150</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Myers, Frederic, W. H. <a href='#Page_140'><b>140</b></a>, <a href='#Page_148'><b>148</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nature, <a href='#Page_171'><b>171</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Naval Observatory, <a href='#Page_127'><b>127</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Neptune, <a href='#Page_84'><b>84</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">New England, <a href='#Page_213'><b>213</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">New Jersey, <a href='#Page_242'><b>242</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">New Jerusalem, <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">New Testament, <a href='#Page_148'><b>148</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">New Year, the, <a href='#Page_203'><b>203</b></a>, <a href='#Page_204'><b>204</b></a>, <a href='#Page_320'><b>320</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">New York, <a href='#Page_240'><b>240</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"New York Herald," <a href='#Page_48'><b>48</b></a>, <a href='#Page_151'><b>151</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"&mdash;&mdash; Mirror," <a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"&mdash;&mdash; Tribune," <a href='#Page_238'><b>238</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Niagara, <a href='#Page_153'><b>153</b></a>, <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>, <a href='#Page_231'><b>231</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nile, <a href='#Page_142'><b>142</b></a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Observatory, the Minnesota University, <a href='#Page_144'><b>144</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ohio, <a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Orion, <a href='#Page_317'><b>317</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ostwald, Dr., <a href='#Page_334'><b>334</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Paderewski, Ignace, <a href='#Page_340'><b>340</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Paradise, <a href='#Page_63'><b>63</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Paradiso," <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Paris, <a href='#Page_95'><b>95</b></a>, <a href='#Page_149'><b>149</b></a>, <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>, <a href='#Page_275'><b>275</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Parkhurst, Rev. Dr., <a href='#Page_325'><b>325</b></a>, <a href='#Page_328'><b>328</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Parsival," <a href='#Page_265'><b>265</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Permian, <a href='#Page_229'><b>229</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Phillips, Stephen, <a href='#Page_145'><b>145</b></a>, <a href='#Page_263'><b>263</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pierce, Hon. Franklin, <a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pike's Peak, <a href='#Page_238'><b>238</b></a>, <a href='#Page_239'><b>239</b></a>, <a href='#Page_244'><b>244</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pope, General, <a href='#Page_249'><b>249</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Powell, Major John W., <a href='#Page_231'><b>231</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Preece, Sir William, <a href='#Page_127'><b>127</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Prentice, George D., <a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Presbyterian, <a href='#Page_169'><b>169</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Promised Land, <a href='#Page_204'><b>204</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Protestant, <a href='#Page_274'><b>274</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Prudhomme, Sully, <a href='#Page_8'><b>8</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Psychical Research, <a href='#Page_141'><b>141</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pueblo, <a href='#Page_248'><b>248</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pyramids, <a href='#Page_142'><b>142</b></a>, <a href='#Page_143'><b>143</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quackenbos, Dr. John D., <a href='#Page_160'><b>160</b></a>, <a href='#Page_161'><b>161</b></a>, <a href='#Page_172'><b>172</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Reichenbach, Anton Benedict, remarkable experiments of, <a href='#Page_135'><b>135</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Roberts, Professor, electrical work of, <a href='#Page_153'><b>153</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Robinson, Solon, <a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rocky Mountains, the, <a href='#Page_244'><b>244</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">R&ouml;ntgen ray, <a href='#Page_41'><b>41</b></a>, <a href='#Page_60'><b>60</b></a>, <a href='#Page_73'><b>73</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Royal Gorge, <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; Institute, <a href='#Page_81'><b>81</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; Society, <a href='#Page_12'><b>12</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; University of Denmark, <a href='#Page_151'><b>151</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Royce, Prof. Josiah, <a href='#Page_32'><b>32</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rumford, Count, experiments of, <a href='#Page_338'><b>338</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Saint John, <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; Paul, the two bodies described by, <a href='#Page_32'><b>32</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">counsel of, <a href='#Page_64'><b>64</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">spiritual things discerned by, <a href='#Page_84'><b>84</b></a>, <a href='#Page_143'><b>143</b></a>, <a href='#Page_178'><b>178</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">admonitions of, <a href='#Page_310'><b>310</b></a>, <a href='#Page_325'><b>325</b></a>, <a href='#Page_326'><b>326</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Cathedral of, <a href='#Page_163'><b>163</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; Pierre, <a href='#Page_48'><b>48</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;&mdash; Sulpice, <a href='#Page_275'><b>275</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">San Francisco, <a href='#Page_234'><b>234</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Santa F&eacute; road, <a href='#Page_233'><b>233</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Secretary of War, the, <a href='#Page_249'><b>249</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Shakespeare, <a href='#Page_201'><b>201</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sherman, Gen. W. T., <a href='#Page_249'><b>249</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Shinumo Altar, <a href='#Page_236'><b>236</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Silver State, the, <a href='#Page_254'><b>254</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sir Hugo, <a href='#Page_222'><b>222</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Smyth, Rev. Dr. Newman, <a href='#Page_66'><b>66</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Snowy Range, the, <a href='#Page_238'><b>238</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Society of Arts, <a href='#Page_124'><b>124</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Solomon's Temple, <a href='#Page_227'><b>227</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">South Platte River, <a href='#Page_244'><b>244</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Southern Cross, <a href='#Page_142'><b>142</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Spencer, Herbert, <a href='#Page_204'><b>204</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Spirit, whisper of the, <a href='#Page_305'><b>305</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">State University Observatory, Minnesota, <a href='#Page_144'><b>144</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Stowe, Mrs. Harriet, n&eacute;e Beecher, <a href='#Page_213'><b>213</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tennyson, Lord Alfred, <a href='#Page_87'><b>87</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tertiary, <a href='#Page_229'><b>229</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tesla, Nicola, <a href='#Page_116'><b>116</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">discovery of, <a href='#Page_122'><b>122</b></a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">human energy discussed by, <a href='#Page_188'><b>188</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Texas, <a href='#Page_205'><b>205</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"The Gleam," <a href='#Page_182'><b>182</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"The Inferno," <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"The Country God Forgot," <a href='#Page_234'><b>234</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"The Perfect Way," <a href='#Page_255'><b>255</b></a>, <a href='#Page_256'><b>256</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"The World Beautiful," <a href='#Page_25'><b>25</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Thompson, Prof. J. J., <a href='#Page_9'><b>9</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Thornburg, Major, <a href='#Page_249'><b>249</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Titanic, <a href='#Page_226'><b>226</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Trinity Church, <a href='#Page_54'><b>54</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Twentieth Century, <a href='#Page_198'><b>198</b></a>, <a href='#Page_264'><b>264</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Union Colony, <a href='#Page_244'><b>244</b></a>, <a href='#Page_247'><b>247</b></a>, <a href='#Page_248'><b>248</b></a>, <a href='#Page_253'><b>253</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Unitarian, <a href='#Page_169'><b>169</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">United States, <a href='#Page_42'><b>42</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Universe, <a href='#Page_109'><b>109</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Unseen, the, <a href='#Page_173'><b>173</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ursa Major, <a href='#Page_317'><b>317</b></a>, <a href='#Page_318'><b>318</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Utah, <a href='#Page_228'><b>228</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Utes, the, <a href='#Page_247'><b>247</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Vatican, the, <a href='#Page_256'><b>256</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Vedantic, <a href='#Page_332'><b>332</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Vedder, Elihu, <a href='#Page_177'><b>177</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">"Vita Nuova," <a href='#Page_185'><b>185</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Walnut Ca&ntilde;on, <a href='#Page_235'><b>235</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Warren, Rev. Dr. Walpole, <a href='#Page_60'><b>60</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Washington, <a href='#Page_127'><b>127</b></a>, <a href='#Page_246'><b>246</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Washington Monument, <a href='#Page_227'><b>227</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Watterson, Col. Henry, <a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Wells, H. G., theories of, on foretelling the future, <a href='#Page_81'><b>81</b></a>, <a href='#Page_83'><b>83</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">West, the, <a href='#Page_238'><b>238</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Western Reserve, the, <a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Westminster Abbey, <a href='#Page_142'><b>142</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">White Mountains, the, <a href='#Page_48'><b>48</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">White River, <a href='#Page_238'><b>238</b></a>, <a href='#Page_247'><b>247</b></a>, <a href='#Page_251'><b>251</b></a>, <a href='#Page_261'><b>261</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Whittier, John Greenleaf, <a href='#Page_288'><b>288</b></a>, <a href='#Page_320'><b>320</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Whyte, Rev. Dr. Alexander, <a href='#Page_212'><b>212</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Wilberforce, Rev. Dr. Basil, Archdeacon of Westminster, <a href='#Page_141'><b>141</b></a>, <a href='#Page_142'><b>142</b></a>.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Will of God, <a href='#Page_282'><b>282</b></a>, <a href='#Page_284'><b>284</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Young, John Russell, <a href='#Page_243'><b>243</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Zuni, <a href='#Page_235'><b>235</b></a>.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><i>Lilian Whiting's Works</i></h2>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">The World Beautiful</span>. First Series</h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">The World Beautiful</span>. Second Series</h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">The World Beautiful</span>. Third Series</h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">After Her Death</span>. The Story of a Summer</h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">The Spiritual Significance</span></h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Kate Field</span>: A Record</h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">From Dreamland Sent</span>. Verses of the Life to Come</h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">A Study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning</span></h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">The World Beautiful in Books</span></h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Boston Days</span></h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">The Life Radiant</span></h4>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>The World Beautiful</h2>
+
+<h4>By LILIAN WHITING</h4>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.&mdash;<span class="smcap">B. O. Flower</span>, <i>in The Coming
+Age</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p><b>The World Beautiful (First Series)</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>16mo. Cloth, $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25. Comprising: <span class="smcap">The World
+Beautiful; Friendship; Our Social Salvation; Lotus Eating; That
+Which is to Come.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Prof. Louis J. Block</span>, <i>in The
+Philosophical Journal.</i></p>
+
+<p>No one can read it without feeling himself the better and richer and
+happier for having done so.&mdash;<i>The Independent</i>.</p>
+
+<p><b>The World Beautiful (Second Series)</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>16mo. Cloth, $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25. Comprising: <span class="smcap">The World
+Beautiful; Our Best Society; To Clasp Eternal Beauty; Vibrations;
+The Unseen World.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>The style is at once graceful and lively. Every touch is fresh.&mdash;<i>Zion's
+Herald.</i></p>
+
+<p><b>The World Beautiful (Third Series)</b></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>16mo. Cloth, $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25. Comprising: <span class="smcap">The World
+Beautiful; the Rose Of Dawn; the Encircling Spirit-world; The Ring
+of Amethyst; Paradisa Gloria.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>The thoughtful reader who loves spiritual themes will find these pages
+inspiring.&mdash;<i>Chicago Inter-Ocean</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>After Her Death</h2>
+
+<h4>The Story of a Summer</h4>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>By <span class="smcap">Lilian Whiting</span>, author of "The World Beautiful," etc. 16mo.
+Cloth, $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>Comprising: <span class="smcap">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.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>My conviction is that every preacher, reformer, religious editor, and
+Christian worker should read the books by Lilian Whiting.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Rev. W. H.
+Rogers</span>, in <i>The Christian Standard</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"After Her Death" has given me the light and help I have so long craved;
+it has given me comfort and strength which <i>no other</i> book has ever
+done.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Cordelia L. Commore.</span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>From Dreamland Sent</h2>
+
+<h4>Verses of the Life to Come</h4>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>By <span class="smcap">Lilian Whiting</span>. New Edition, with additional verses, 16mo.
+Cloth, extra, $1.00. Decorated cloth, $1.25.</p></div>
+
+<p>Lilian Whiting's verse is like a bit of sunlit landscape on a May
+morning.&mdash;<i>Boston Herald.</i></p>
+
+<p>Graceful, tender, and true, appealing to what is best in the human
+heart.&mdash;<i>The Independent.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Sarah Holland Adams.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>Kate field: A Record</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>By <span class="smcap">Lilian Whiting</span>. 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.</p></div>
+
+<h4>CONTENTS</h4>
+
+<p>CHILDHOOD AND CIRCUMSTANCE.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>An Interesting Heredity; Family Letters; Mr.
+and Mrs. Field's Stage Life; Death of Joseph M. Field; The Mother and
+Daughter.</p></div>
+
+<p>EARLY YOUTH.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Aspirations and Studies; Interest in Art and Literature;
+Ardent Devotion to Music.</p></div>
+
+<p>FLORENTINE DAYS.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>At Villa Bellosguardi; Enthusiasm for Italy; George
+Eliot and the Trollopes; Walter Savage Landor; At Casa Guidi with the
+Brownings.</p></div>
+
+<p>LECTURING AND WRITING.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Intense Energy of Purpose; John Brown's Grave;
+Ristori, Fechter, and the Drama; Planchette's Diary; Death of Eliza
+Riddle Field.</p></div>
+
+<p>EUROPE REVISITED.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Among London Celebrities; In Spain with Castelar;
+Music and Drama; Professor Bell and the Telephone; The Shakespeare
+Memorial.</p></div>
+
+<p>A SIGNIFICANT DECADE.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Return to America; Failures and Renewed Effort;
+The Mormon Problem; Alaska and the Golden Gate; Fame and Friends.</p></div>
+
+<p>"KATE FIELD'S WASHINGTON."</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A Unique Enterprise; Miss Gilder's
+Friendship; Charming Life in the Capitol; The Columbian Exposition;
+France decorated Kate Field.</p></div>
+
+<p>CROSSING THE BAR.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A Journey of Destiny; Life and Studies in Hawaii;
+Noble and Generous Work; The Angel of Death.</p></div>
+
+<p>IN RETROSPECT.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Universal Appreciation and Love; The Strange Ordering of
+Circumstance; A Sculptured Cross in Mount Auburn; Death only an Event in
+Life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span></p></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>The Spiritual Significance</h2>
+
+<h4>or, Death as an Event in Life</h4>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>By <span class="smcap">Lilian Whiting</span>. Author of "The World Beautiful," "Boston Days,"
+etc. 16mo. Cloth, $1.00. Decorated cloth, gilt top, $1.25.
+Comprising: <span class="smcap">The Spiritual Significance; Vision And Achievement;
+Between the Seen and The Unseen; Psychic Communication; the Gates
+Of New Life.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;<i>The Outlook.</i></p>
+
+<p>A book from her pen means new flashes of insight, a revelation of
+spiritual truth almost Emersonian in kind.&mdash;<i>Chicago Chronicle.</i></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="The_World_Beautiful" id="The_World_Beautiful"></a>The World Beautiful in Books</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>By <span class="smcap">Lilian Whiting</span>. 16mo. Cloth, $1.00 <i>net</i>. Decorated cloth, $1.25
+<i>net</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>The careful and repeated reading of "The World Beautiful in Books" would
+be a liberal education.&mdash;<i>Philadelphia Telegraph.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;<i>Chicago Post.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;<i>The Era</i>, Philadelphia.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>Boston Days</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The City of Beautiful Ideals, Concord and Its Famous Authors, The
+Golden Age of Genius, Dawn of the Twentieth Century. By <span class="smcap">Lilian
+Whiting</span>. Author of "The World Beautiful," etc. With portraits and
+other illustrations. 12mo. Decorated cloth, $1.50 <i>net</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>All the famous names associated with Boston pass in review before the
+reader of this apotheosis of the intellectual life of
+Massachusetts.&mdash;<i>The Boston Herald.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;<i>Albany Argus.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;<i>Cleveland Plain Dealer.</i></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>The Life Radiant</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>By <span class="smcap">Lilian Whiting</span>, 16mo. Cloth, $1.00 <i>net</i>. Decorated cloth, $1.25
+<i>net</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>Little, Brown, &amp; Company, Publishers</h3>
+
+<h3>254 Washington Street, Boston, Mass.</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE RADIANT***</p>
+<p>******* This file should be named 23820-h.txt or 23820-h.zip *******</p>
+<p>This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:<br />
+<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/3/8/2/23820">http://www.gutenberg.org/2/3/8/2/23820</a></p>
+<p>Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.</p>
+
+<p>Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.</p>
+
+
+
+<pre>
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/license">http://www.gutenberg.org/license)</a>.
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS,' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Each eBook is in a subdirectory of the same number as the eBook's
+eBook number, often in several formats including plain vanilla ASCII,
+compressed (zipped), HTML and others.
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks replace the old file and take over
+the old filename and etext number.  The replaced older file is renamed.
+VERSIONS based on separate sources are treated as new eBooks receiving
+new filenames and etext numbers.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org">http://www.gutenberg.org</a>
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+EBooks posted prior to November 2003, with eBook numbers BELOW #10000,
+are filed in directories based on their release date.  If you want to
+download any of these eBooks directly, rather than using the regular
+search system you may utilize the following addresses and just
+download by the etext year.
+
+<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext06/">http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext06/</a>
+
+    (Or /etext 05, 04, 03, 02, 01, 00, 99,
+     98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90)
+
+EBooks posted since November 2003, with etext numbers OVER #10000, are
+filed in a different way.  The year of a release date is no longer part
+of the directory path.  The path is based on the etext number (which is
+identical to the filename).  The path to the file is made up of single
+digits corresponding to all but the last digit in the filename.  For
+example an eBook of filename 10234 would be found at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/0/2/3/10234
+
+or filename 24689 would be found at:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/4/6/8/24689
+
+An alternative method of locating eBooks:
+<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/GUTINDEX.ALL">http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/GUTINDEX.ALL</a>
+
+*** END: FULL LICENSE ***
+</pre>
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/23820-h/images/cover.jpg b/23820-h/images/cover.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cbb8c83
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-h/images/cover.jpg
diff --git a/23820-page-images/c001.jpg b/23820-page-images/c001.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..490d8f7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/c001.jpg
diff --git a/23820-page-images/f001.png b/23820-page-images/f001.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..34770f6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/f001.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/f002.png b/23820-page-images/f002.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c4f1f11
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/f002.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/f003.png b/23820-page-images/f003.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1e76132
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/f003.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/f004.png b/23820-page-images/f004.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9975cec
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/f004.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/f005.png b/23820-page-images/f005.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f20bbba
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/f005.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/f006.png b/23820-page-images/f006.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c70c305
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/f006.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/f007.png b/23820-page-images/f007.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..126c5af
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/f007.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/f008.png b/23820-page-images/f008.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6c45f1b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/f008.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/f009.png b/23820-page-images/f009.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0e7fcff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/f009.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/f010.png b/23820-page-images/f010.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c409af3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/f010.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p003.png b/23820-page-images/p003.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..41c7428
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p003.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p004.png b/23820-page-images/p004.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3c90edc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p004.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p005.png b/23820-page-images/p005.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..52a4a8f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p005.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p006.png b/23820-page-images/p006.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7a2ddee
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p006.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p007.png b/23820-page-images/p007.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f25f462
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p007.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p008.png b/23820-page-images/p008.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..70a136a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p008.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p009.png b/23820-page-images/p009.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..328fa32
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p009.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p010.png b/23820-page-images/p010.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e124202
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p010.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p011.png b/23820-page-images/p011.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3437f87
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p011.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p012.png b/23820-page-images/p012.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..de0bd6a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p012.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p013.png b/23820-page-images/p013.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b60795f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p013.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p014.png b/23820-page-images/p014.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e43fa8d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p014.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p015.png b/23820-page-images/p015.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7b91401
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p015.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p016.png b/23820-page-images/p016.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..111f7d3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p016.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p017.png b/23820-page-images/p017.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d153622
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p017.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p018.png b/23820-page-images/p018.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..917c699
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p018.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p019.png b/23820-page-images/p019.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f92b717
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p019.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p020.png b/23820-page-images/p020.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b5e75cd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p020.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p021.png b/23820-page-images/p021.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2db4e74
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p021.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p022.png b/23820-page-images/p022.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d7c75d2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p022.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p023.png b/23820-page-images/p023.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7e2f332
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p023.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p024.png b/23820-page-images/p024.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..434b5d0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p024.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p025.png b/23820-page-images/p025.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..001954e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p025.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p026.png b/23820-page-images/p026.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f229fbc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p026.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p027.png b/23820-page-images/p027.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..70e5b44
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p027.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p028.png b/23820-page-images/p028.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e81df0e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p028.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p029.png b/23820-page-images/p029.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4fc18da
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p029.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p030.png b/23820-page-images/p030.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..66b2c8e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p030.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p031.png b/23820-page-images/p031.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3b3aa2f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p031.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p032.png b/23820-page-images/p032.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..339b6dc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p032.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p033.png b/23820-page-images/p033.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d281b0c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p033.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p034.png b/23820-page-images/p034.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6cdde72
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p034.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p035.png b/23820-page-images/p035.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2b2969b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p035.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p036.png b/23820-page-images/p036.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f3f4052
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p036.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p037.png b/23820-page-images/p037.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4887a9f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p037.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p038.png b/23820-page-images/p038.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d2201e9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p038.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p039.png b/23820-page-images/p039.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..181c995
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p039.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p040.png b/23820-page-images/p040.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3d2fd12
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p040.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p041.png b/23820-page-images/p041.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..45fe324
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p041.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p042.png b/23820-page-images/p042.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d2c1130
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p042.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p043.png b/23820-page-images/p043.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3460b66
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p043.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p044.png b/23820-page-images/p044.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b0f1b02
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p044.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p045.png b/23820-page-images/p045.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..45414c2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p045.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p046.png b/23820-page-images/p046.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2ee3506
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p046.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p047.png b/23820-page-images/p047.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..48fc0d4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p047.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p048.png b/23820-page-images/p048.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..267d75c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p048.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p049.png b/23820-page-images/p049.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..88148c6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p049.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p050.png b/23820-page-images/p050.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..69ed0cb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p050.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p051.png b/23820-page-images/p051.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..49c1c4c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p051.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p052.png b/23820-page-images/p052.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b75254b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p052.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p053.png b/23820-page-images/p053.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..915b0ce
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p053.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p054.png b/23820-page-images/p054.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..be802ed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p054.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p055.png b/23820-page-images/p055.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..249518c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p055.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p056.png b/23820-page-images/p056.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8eb9112
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p056.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p057.png b/23820-page-images/p057.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ee1ac83
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p057.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p058.png b/23820-page-images/p058.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..06d3efb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p058.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p059.png b/23820-page-images/p059.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4ab871d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p059.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p060.png b/23820-page-images/p060.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a1c7bc7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p060.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p061.png b/23820-page-images/p061.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bf476a3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p061.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p062.png b/23820-page-images/p062.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..861f4ee
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p062.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p063.png b/23820-page-images/p063.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dbaddb8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p063.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p064.png b/23820-page-images/p064.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bcfc1a2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p064.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p065.png b/23820-page-images/p065.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..85bde44
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p065.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p066.png b/23820-page-images/p066.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2c1b226
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p066.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p067.png b/23820-page-images/p067.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4b845df
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p067.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p068.png b/23820-page-images/p068.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7ae61e4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p068.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p069.png b/23820-page-images/p069.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..97fcbf2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p069.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p070.png b/23820-page-images/p070.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f8ba59c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p070.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p071.png b/23820-page-images/p071.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..973183c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p071.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p072.png b/23820-page-images/p072.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ea1387b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p072.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p073.png b/23820-page-images/p073.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1671f7c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p073.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p074.png b/23820-page-images/p074.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..60f3e12
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p074.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p075.png b/23820-page-images/p075.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b4b1b1f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p075.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p076.png b/23820-page-images/p076.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e7b0bc9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p076.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p077.png b/23820-page-images/p077.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4798202
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p077.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p078.png b/23820-page-images/p078.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ab6ae76
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p078.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p079.png b/23820-page-images/p079.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c16e1cb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p079.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p080.png b/23820-page-images/p080.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ab9bd60
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p080.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p081.png b/23820-page-images/p081.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a380253
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p081.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p082.png b/23820-page-images/p082.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..72bcd57
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p082.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p083.png b/23820-page-images/p083.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9b9ef0f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p083.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p084.png b/23820-page-images/p084.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5ff9050
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p084.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p085.png b/23820-page-images/p085.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..aa61f7e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p085.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p086.png b/23820-page-images/p086.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..654f840
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p086.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p087.png b/23820-page-images/p087.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e8b0b70
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p087.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p088.png b/23820-page-images/p088.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a6348bd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p088.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p089.png b/23820-page-images/p089.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9de6dfc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p089.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p090.png b/23820-page-images/p090.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f203ebe
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p090.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p091.png b/23820-page-images/p091.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bc8f4dc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p091.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p092.png b/23820-page-images/p092.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b2ade54
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p092.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p093.png b/23820-page-images/p093.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..45ff3d7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p093.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p094.png b/23820-page-images/p094.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a451d67
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p094.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p095.png b/23820-page-images/p095.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..68d79d7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p095.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p096.png b/23820-page-images/p096.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f1ef210
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p096.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p097.png b/23820-page-images/p097.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d23c4b4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p097.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p098.png b/23820-page-images/p098.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..87c3d97
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p098.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p099.png b/23820-page-images/p099.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9143f37
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p099.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p100.png b/23820-page-images/p100.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f287469
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p100.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p101.png b/23820-page-images/p101.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5d3adb0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p101.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p102.png b/23820-page-images/p102.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..335b078
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p102.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p103.png b/23820-page-images/p103.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d558cc1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p103.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p104.png b/23820-page-images/p104.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..11d1abb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p104.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p105.png b/23820-page-images/p105.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7977d11
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p105.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p106.png b/23820-page-images/p106.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..05ad844
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p106.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p107.png b/23820-page-images/p107.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7b17af5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p107.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p108.png b/23820-page-images/p108.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..479e71f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p108.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p109.png b/23820-page-images/p109.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5b5a0f6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p109.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p110.png b/23820-page-images/p110.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..df0c68d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p110.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p111.png b/23820-page-images/p111.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eed02dd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p111.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p112.png b/23820-page-images/p112.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fd474ae
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p112.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p113.png b/23820-page-images/p113.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..31d448a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p113.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p114.png b/23820-page-images/p114.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b3b69e7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p114.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p115.png b/23820-page-images/p115.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3645a0e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p115.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p116.png b/23820-page-images/p116.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..973ecfc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p116.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p117.png b/23820-page-images/p117.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2b67784
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p117.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p118.png b/23820-page-images/p118.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a03f029
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p118.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p119.png b/23820-page-images/p119.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..29e3981
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p119.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p120.png b/23820-page-images/p120.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e4baa8b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p120.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p121.png b/23820-page-images/p121.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3547077
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p121.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p122.png b/23820-page-images/p122.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6d042bd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p122.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p123.png b/23820-page-images/p123.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1e35b9b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p123.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p124.png b/23820-page-images/p124.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a1f783b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p124.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p125.png b/23820-page-images/p125.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..271dbf1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p125.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p126.png b/23820-page-images/p126.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c9c6574
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p126.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p127.png b/23820-page-images/p127.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..51cdbd7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p127.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p128.png b/23820-page-images/p128.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b7e2869
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p128.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p129.png b/23820-page-images/p129.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8e9ab77
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p129.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p130.png b/23820-page-images/p130.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..db614eb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p130.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p131.png b/23820-page-images/p131.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..38320db
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p131.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p132.png b/23820-page-images/p132.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2fa33c3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p132.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p133.png b/23820-page-images/p133.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a73ce9a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p133.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p134.png b/23820-page-images/p134.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a03d976
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p134.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p135.png b/23820-page-images/p135.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..05d0780
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p135.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p136.png b/23820-page-images/p136.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f9629a7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p136.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p137.png b/23820-page-images/p137.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f16bc96
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p137.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p138.png b/23820-page-images/p138.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..88dc15d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p138.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p139.png b/23820-page-images/p139.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a44ba25
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p139.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p140.png b/23820-page-images/p140.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dd0e751
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p140.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p141.png b/23820-page-images/p141.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..24ea69a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p141.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p142.png b/23820-page-images/p142.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..45fa448
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p142.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p143.png b/23820-page-images/p143.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..da651bb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p143.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p144.png b/23820-page-images/p144.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5b5cc45
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p144.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p145.png b/23820-page-images/p145.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..42130d2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p145.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p146.png b/23820-page-images/p146.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..230b80e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p146.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p147.png b/23820-page-images/p147.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9694468
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p147.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p148.png b/23820-page-images/p148.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f6f8585
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p148.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p149.png b/23820-page-images/p149.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c462e90
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p149.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p150.png b/23820-page-images/p150.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bfc4823
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p150.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p151.png b/23820-page-images/p151.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7811706
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p151.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p152.png b/23820-page-images/p152.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ff54043
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p152.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p153.png b/23820-page-images/p153.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f654e54
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p153.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p154.png b/23820-page-images/p154.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f261324
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p154.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p155.png b/23820-page-images/p155.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..281c186
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p155.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p156.png b/23820-page-images/p156.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4463eff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p156.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p157.png b/23820-page-images/p157.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..edcf44f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p157.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p158.png b/23820-page-images/p158.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e0c733f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p158.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p159.png b/23820-page-images/p159.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6130956
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p159.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p160.png b/23820-page-images/p160.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5830103
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p160.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p161.png b/23820-page-images/p161.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5ca1e89
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p161.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p162.png b/23820-page-images/p162.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..65d9f66
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p162.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p163.png b/23820-page-images/p163.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c92538e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p163.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p164.png b/23820-page-images/p164.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..01f8775
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p164.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p165.png b/23820-page-images/p165.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2b1e5a5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p165.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p166.png b/23820-page-images/p166.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..73d95c5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p166.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p167.png b/23820-page-images/p167.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..085f4b8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p167.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p168.png b/23820-page-images/p168.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..85992a2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p168.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p169.png b/23820-page-images/p169.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e320880
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p169.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p170.png b/23820-page-images/p170.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6c61672
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p170.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p171.png b/23820-page-images/p171.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cd6d658
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p171.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p172.png b/23820-page-images/p172.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7bdfc06
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p172.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p173.png b/23820-page-images/p173.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d237e95
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p173.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p174.png b/23820-page-images/p174.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..48b4407
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p174.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p175.png b/23820-page-images/p175.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..56df732
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p175.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p176.png b/23820-page-images/p176.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ed29806
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p176.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p177.png b/23820-page-images/p177.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3fa1171
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p177.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p178.png b/23820-page-images/p178.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9e12862
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p178.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p179.png b/23820-page-images/p179.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..518aed6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p179.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p180.png b/23820-page-images/p180.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..deb5790
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p180.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p181.png b/23820-page-images/p181.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b21d6fe
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p181.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p182.png b/23820-page-images/p182.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ba3f373
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p182.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p183.png b/23820-page-images/p183.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ecdd925
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p183.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p184.png b/23820-page-images/p184.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4842175
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p184.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p185.png b/23820-page-images/p185.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e73c32a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p185.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p186.png b/23820-page-images/p186.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e3c5fed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p186.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p187.png b/23820-page-images/p187.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0df40cd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p187.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p188.png b/23820-page-images/p188.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e15ef5a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p188.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p189.png b/23820-page-images/p189.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..862249d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p189.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p190.png b/23820-page-images/p190.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..03d7259
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p190.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p191.png b/23820-page-images/p191.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..104a2bb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p191.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p192.png b/23820-page-images/p192.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..db324bd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p192.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p193.png b/23820-page-images/p193.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8e86d00
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p193.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p194.png b/23820-page-images/p194.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7e9fd9d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p194.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p195.png b/23820-page-images/p195.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f86cc65
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p195.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p196.png b/23820-page-images/p196.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..17fea77
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p196.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p197.png b/23820-page-images/p197.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..45410dd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p197.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p198.png b/23820-page-images/p198.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c3799a7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p198.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p199.png b/23820-page-images/p199.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7f2fad4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p199.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p200.png b/23820-page-images/p200.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f4e1366
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p200.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p201.png b/23820-page-images/p201.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..28f850c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p201.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p202.png b/23820-page-images/p202.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1da679a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p202.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p203.png b/23820-page-images/p203.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2dceda8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p203.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p204.png b/23820-page-images/p204.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0010896
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p204.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p205.png b/23820-page-images/p205.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d020ec6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p205.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p206.png b/23820-page-images/p206.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..af4d90c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p206.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p207.png b/23820-page-images/p207.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bc1b0fb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p207.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p208.png b/23820-page-images/p208.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..39c5043
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p208.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p209.png b/23820-page-images/p209.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a08ba2a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p209.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p210.png b/23820-page-images/p210.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..df0e3ee
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p210.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p211.png b/23820-page-images/p211.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4e7c91e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p211.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p212.png b/23820-page-images/p212.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9809d09
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p212.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p213.png b/23820-page-images/p213.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..224abbb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p213.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p214.png b/23820-page-images/p214.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d73fdb1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p214.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p215.png b/23820-page-images/p215.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cecdb17
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p215.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p216.png b/23820-page-images/p216.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..48f9091
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p216.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p217.png b/23820-page-images/p217.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bf299c7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p217.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p218.png b/23820-page-images/p218.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6f3b05a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p218.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p219.png b/23820-page-images/p219.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..13f5c06
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p219.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p220.png b/23820-page-images/p220.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f1f5fb1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p220.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p221.png b/23820-page-images/p221.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c483acd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p221.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p222.png b/23820-page-images/p222.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0b401ec
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p222.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p223.png b/23820-page-images/p223.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5d97e29
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p223.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p224.png b/23820-page-images/p224.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7e90330
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p224.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p225.png b/23820-page-images/p225.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c6e5389
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p225.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p226.png b/23820-page-images/p226.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4ee2b6b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p226.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p227.png b/23820-page-images/p227.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4a7ad44
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p227.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p228.png b/23820-page-images/p228.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fe3cb7a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p228.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p229.png b/23820-page-images/p229.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..37b7b83
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p229.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p230.png b/23820-page-images/p230.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..add2adc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p230.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p231.png b/23820-page-images/p231.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5ce2f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p231.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p232.png b/23820-page-images/p232.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3117237
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p232.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p233.png b/23820-page-images/p233.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..901d2df
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p233.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p234.png b/23820-page-images/p234.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d884dd3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p234.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p235.png b/23820-page-images/p235.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..40440cf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p235.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p236.png b/23820-page-images/p236.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..aec4eaf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p236.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p237.png b/23820-page-images/p237.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..513cd43
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p237.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p238.png b/23820-page-images/p238.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..43716c5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p238.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p239.png b/23820-page-images/p239.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7ce15f7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p239.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p240.png b/23820-page-images/p240.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..443dc46
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p240.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p241.png b/23820-page-images/p241.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9d3098a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p241.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p242.png b/23820-page-images/p242.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..27e410e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p242.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p243.png b/23820-page-images/p243.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a0a3e59
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p243.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p244.png b/23820-page-images/p244.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3446c00
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p244.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p245.png b/23820-page-images/p245.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e382142
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p245.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p246.png b/23820-page-images/p246.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e06b6b0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p246.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p247.png b/23820-page-images/p247.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..38dbf01
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p247.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p248.png b/23820-page-images/p248.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1fb8202
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p248.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p249.png b/23820-page-images/p249.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b629f41
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p249.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p250.png b/23820-page-images/p250.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8c28d88
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p250.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p251.png b/23820-page-images/p251.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f988906
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p251.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p252.png b/23820-page-images/p252.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..16901c5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p252.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p253.png b/23820-page-images/p253.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e767307
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p253.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p254.png b/23820-page-images/p254.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7dffee0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p254.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p255.png b/23820-page-images/p255.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e48945f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p255.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p256.png b/23820-page-images/p256.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6b304ea
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p256.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p257.png b/23820-page-images/p257.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bbd3818
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p257.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p258.png b/23820-page-images/p258.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..19fdfa7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p258.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p259.png b/23820-page-images/p259.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0bc72fb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p259.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p260.png b/23820-page-images/p260.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..11b75c6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p260.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p261.png b/23820-page-images/p261.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1d87f60
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p261.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p262.png b/23820-page-images/p262.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c79ac92
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p262.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p263.png b/23820-page-images/p263.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..49e03ee
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p263.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p264.png b/23820-page-images/p264.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7572a1f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p264.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p265.png b/23820-page-images/p265.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0f4c911
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p265.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p266.png b/23820-page-images/p266.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8234131
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p266.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p267.png b/23820-page-images/p267.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e5e96a9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p267.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p268.png b/23820-page-images/p268.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2590a8c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p268.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p269.png b/23820-page-images/p269.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e6b5e6c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p269.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p270.png b/23820-page-images/p270.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..616818a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p270.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p271.png b/23820-page-images/p271.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..153ffa7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p271.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p272.png b/23820-page-images/p272.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..242c3b5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p272.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p273.png b/23820-page-images/p273.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3174ee9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p273.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p274.png b/23820-page-images/p274.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fef3e9b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p274.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p275.png b/23820-page-images/p275.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1a23e24
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p275.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p276.png b/23820-page-images/p276.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..489783f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p276.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p277.png b/23820-page-images/p277.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ca2f501
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p277.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p278.png b/23820-page-images/p278.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..48d50fd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p278.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p279.png b/23820-page-images/p279.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fbb9d9e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p279.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p280.png b/23820-page-images/p280.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3f18457
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p280.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p281.png b/23820-page-images/p281.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1fab47b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p281.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p282.png b/23820-page-images/p282.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4c86c1d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p282.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p283.png b/23820-page-images/p283.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eb4a916
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p283.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p284.png b/23820-page-images/p284.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6e7e410
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p284.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p285.png b/23820-page-images/p285.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9bacf30
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p285.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p286.png b/23820-page-images/p286.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0c3e880
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p286.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p287.png b/23820-page-images/p287.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d43d136
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p287.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p288.png b/23820-page-images/p288.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..79e9573
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p288.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p289.png b/23820-page-images/p289.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7883a8a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p289.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p290.png b/23820-page-images/p290.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3e592f2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p290.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p291.png b/23820-page-images/p291.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eee1474
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p291.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p292.png b/23820-page-images/p292.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..86015f9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p292.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p293.png b/23820-page-images/p293.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c28b0d7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p293.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p294.png b/23820-page-images/p294.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c2aef35
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p294.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p295.png b/23820-page-images/p295.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a914d94
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p295.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p296.png b/23820-page-images/p296.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..87f4bff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p296.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p297.png b/23820-page-images/p297.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a51d738
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p297.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p298.png b/23820-page-images/p298.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..be81e93
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p298.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p299.png b/23820-page-images/p299.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..de192bc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p299.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p300.png b/23820-page-images/p300.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e9d9049
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p300.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p301.png b/23820-page-images/p301.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9d346c2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p301.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p302.png b/23820-page-images/p302.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..927e570
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p302.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p303.png b/23820-page-images/p303.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..459fea8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p303.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p304.png b/23820-page-images/p304.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..196923f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p304.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p305.png b/23820-page-images/p305.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d1a0725
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p305.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p306.png b/23820-page-images/p306.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..67cf69a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p306.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p307.png b/23820-page-images/p307.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d36b242
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p307.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p308.png b/23820-page-images/p308.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ac9b799
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p308.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p309.png b/23820-page-images/p309.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1cdf958
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p309.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p310.png b/23820-page-images/p310.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8e3a825
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p310.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p311.png b/23820-page-images/p311.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0f8d79e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p311.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p312.png b/23820-page-images/p312.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b9b865d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p312.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p313.png b/23820-page-images/p313.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..66044f8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p313.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p314.png b/23820-page-images/p314.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..be39c19
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p314.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p315.png b/23820-page-images/p315.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5ac094d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p315.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p316.png b/23820-page-images/p316.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..76b128c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p316.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p317.png b/23820-page-images/p317.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d2f1fe2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p317.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p318.png b/23820-page-images/p318.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1059023
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p318.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p319.png b/23820-page-images/p319.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6c8b453
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p319.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p320.png b/23820-page-images/p320.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1c6409b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p320.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p321.png b/23820-page-images/p321.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..81dd459
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p321.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p322.png b/23820-page-images/p322.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cad5739
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p322.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p323.png b/23820-page-images/p323.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7f478f0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p323.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p324.png b/23820-page-images/p324.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..359f10c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p324.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p325.png b/23820-page-images/p325.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b068079
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p325.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p326.png b/23820-page-images/p326.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6256cfd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p326.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p327.png b/23820-page-images/p327.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..89bab2b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p327.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p328.png b/23820-page-images/p328.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7118ced
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p328.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p329.png b/23820-page-images/p329.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..81f77fd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p329.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p330.png b/23820-page-images/p330.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0a16065
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p330.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p331.png b/23820-page-images/p331.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ad0d5c9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p331.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p332.png b/23820-page-images/p332.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..829116d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p332.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p333.png b/23820-page-images/p333.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a58c6eb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p333.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p334.png b/23820-page-images/p334.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..970a5de
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p334.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p335.png b/23820-page-images/p335.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dd7d87d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p335.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p336.png b/23820-page-images/p336.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9dd6ff2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p336.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p337.png b/23820-page-images/p337.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..16d8e13
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p337.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p338.png b/23820-page-images/p338.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f477214
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p338.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p339.png b/23820-page-images/p339.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ba97b90
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p339.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p340.png b/23820-page-images/p340.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..db5d5dd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p340.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p341.png b/23820-page-images/p341.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f834a56
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p341.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p342.png b/23820-page-images/p342.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b1e7565
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p342.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p343.png b/23820-page-images/p343.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d7400ed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p343.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p344.png b/23820-page-images/p344.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3d2785f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p344.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p345.png b/23820-page-images/p345.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fbe68d1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p345.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p346.png b/23820-page-images/p346.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d175a5a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p346.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p347.png b/23820-page-images/p347.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..080a5bb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p347.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p348.png b/23820-page-images/p348.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f9f0867
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p348.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p349.png b/23820-page-images/p349.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..16603c1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p349.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p350.png b/23820-page-images/p350.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e035e53
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p350.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p351.png b/23820-page-images/p351.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..066e8b3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p351.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p352.png b/23820-page-images/p352.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1db4b21
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p352.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p353.png b/23820-page-images/p353.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..835f80d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p353.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p354.png b/23820-page-images/p354.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9038eab
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p354.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p355.png b/23820-page-images/p355.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3eb11b8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p355.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p356.png b/23820-page-images/p356.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..25dd2ca
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p356.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p357.png b/23820-page-images/p357.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..751f372
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p357.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p358.png b/23820-page-images/p358.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..87b1c1f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p358.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p359.png b/23820-page-images/p359.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..53a73cd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p359.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p360.png b/23820-page-images/p360.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e3da69e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p360.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p361.png b/23820-page-images/p361.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0c93b8f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p361.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p362.png b/23820-page-images/p362.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..479c758
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p362.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p363.png b/23820-page-images/p363.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4e1cf17
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p363.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p364.png b/23820-page-images/p364.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9e071fb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p364.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p365.png b/23820-page-images/p365.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e7734da
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p365.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p366.png b/23820-page-images/p366.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2ce057a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p366.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p367.png b/23820-page-images/p367.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..75ed93d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p367.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p368.png b/23820-page-images/p368.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3a1de08
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p368.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p369.png b/23820-page-images/p369.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a535d5f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p369.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p370.png b/23820-page-images/p370.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..12383cb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p370.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p371.png b/23820-page-images/p371.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..552e59f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p371.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p372.png b/23820-page-images/p372.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..08ce916
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p372.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p373.png b/23820-page-images/p373.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eb431ce
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p373.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p374.png b/23820-page-images/p374.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6be7e3d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p374.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p375.png b/23820-page-images/p375.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..341c5b3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p375.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p376.png b/23820-page-images/p376.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..087e9e7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p376.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p378.png b/23820-page-images/p378.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..129b737
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p378.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p379.png b/23820-page-images/p379.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6943a19
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p379.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p380.png b/23820-page-images/p380.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b5e10ad
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p380.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p381.png b/23820-page-images/p381.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2b45445
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p381.png
diff --git a/23820-page-images/p382.png b/23820-page-images/p382.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f7e8232
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820-page-images/p382.png
diff --git a/23820.txt b/23820.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2b85c4e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7995 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Life Radiant, by Lilian Whiting
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Life Radiant
+
+
+Author: Lilian Whiting
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 11, 2007  [eBook #23820]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE RADIANT***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Annie McGuire, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Book Cover]
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+                                         PAGE
+  THE GOLDEN AGE LIES ONWARD.
+
+    THE SUPREME ILLUMINATION               24
+    CREATING THE NEW WORLD                 26
+    ELIMINATING ANXIETIES                  33
+    HEAVEN'S PERFECT HOUR                  37
+    LOVE AND GOOD WILL                     46
+    THE DIVINER POSSIBILITIES              51
+    THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST                 64
+
+  DISCERNING THE FUTURE.
+
+    A DETERMINING QUESTION                 85
+    IN PROPORTION TO POWER                 99
+
+  THE ETHEREAL REALM.
+
+    A SCIENTIFIC FACT                     124
+    A GLORIOUS INAUGURATION               136
+    FINER COSMIC FORCES                   149
+    HEALTH AND HAPPINESS                  158
+    A NEW FORCE                           172
+    THE SERVICE OF THE GODS               174
+
+  THE POWER OF THE EXALTED MOMENT.
+
+    OBEY THE VISION                       192
+    THE OPEN DOOR                         201
+    INTERRUPTIONS AS OPPORTUNITIES        204
+    THE CHARM OF COMPANIONSHIP            214
+    A SUMMER PILGRIMAGE IN ARIZONA        226
+    A TRAGIC IDYL OF COLORADO             237
+    A REMARKABLE MYSTIC                   254
+    THE MOMENTOUS QUESTION                261
+
+  THE NECTAR OF THE HOUR.
+
+    A PROFOUND EXPERIENCE                 285
+    THE LAW OF PRAYER                     299
+    CONDUCT AND BEAUTY                    313
+    THE DIVINE PANORAMA                   321
+    ALSO THE HOLY GHOST, THE COMFORTER    331
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE RADIANT.
+
+  "_I am Merlin
+  Who follow the Gleam._"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  _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.
+
+
+
+
+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 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."
+
+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 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 twofold 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 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 beautiful 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.
+
+Like an echo of celestial music are these lines by Sully-Prudhomme:--
+
+  "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" 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 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 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 a tiny piece of
+     radium in my waistcoat pocket to a soiree 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 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 recognize 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 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 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
+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 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
+
+  "Born and nourished in miracles."
+
+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:
+
+  "The Fairest enchants me,
+  The Mighty commands me,"
+
+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; 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, 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 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
+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
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Supreme Illumination.]
+
+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."
+
+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; 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Creating the New World.]
+
+"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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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."
+
+[Sidenote: Eliminating Anxieties.]
+
+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
+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,--
+
+  "Things are in the saddle
+  And ride mankind."
+
+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 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 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  "I will wait heaven's perfect hour
+  Through the innumerable years."
+
+[Sidenote: Heaven's Perfect Hour.]
+
+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
+drifting 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 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 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
+
+  "Black spirits or white, blue spirits or gray,"
+
+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. 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 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 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 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 sympathy, 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:--
+
+  "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.
+
+  "I fancied he was fled."
+
+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!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Love and Good Will.]
+
+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?"
+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 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 deg. It would melt the White Mountains into
+     rivers of liquid fire. Nothing could withstand its consuming
+     power.... 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."
+
+The writer describes the discovery and processes at some length, and
+adds:--
+
+     "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."
+
+The article closes with this wonderful paragraph:--
+
+     "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 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
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Diviner Possibilities.]
+
+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,--
+
+  "Does the road wind up hill all the way?"
+
+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 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 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 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 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 Muensterberg 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
+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 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 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 moving 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 opportunity; 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 "plastic to the spirit
+touch;" sensitive to those vibrations too fine to be registered by the
+outward ear.
+
+  "Thought is the wages
+  For which I sell days,"
+
+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--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: "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 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.
+
+[Sidenote: The Weight of the Past.]
+
+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 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 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, 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 measures 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     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_.
+
+                                   --PHILLIPS BROOKS.
+
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 "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 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:--
+
+     "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.
+
+To see the future as clearly as we see the past, what does it require?
+
+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
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: A Determining Question.]
+
+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:
+
+     "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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 interieur_,--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 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 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, 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."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: In Proportion to Power.]
+
+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 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.
+
+  "Lift up your hearts."
+  "We lift them up unto the Lord."
+
+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. 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 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 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 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 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 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'etre_ 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 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+                                    --SIR WILLIAM CROOKES.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     _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._
+
+                                          --HUMAN PERSONALITY.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     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 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
+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. 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 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 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 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 strengthened 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."
+
+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 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 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. 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: A Scientific Fact.]
+
+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,
+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 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 conscious, 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.
+
+Sir William Preece, in a recent address before the Royal Society,
+remarked:--
+
+     "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 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 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.
+
+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, 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 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 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 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
+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 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.
+
+[Sidenote: A Glorious Inauguration.]
+
+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 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 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 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 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, 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 conceptions 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 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 distinct 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 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 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 physical 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 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 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."
+
+[Sidenote: Finer Cosmic Forces.]
+
+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 Musee 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 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 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 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!"
+
+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 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 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 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 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.
+
+Of telepathy Doctor Lodge says:--
+
+     "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 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."
+
+Will this theory furnish the basis for a true interpretation of
+telepathy?
+
+The relations between the individual and the forces of the ethereal
+realm are also determining as regards health.
+
+[Sidenote: Health and Happiness.]
+
+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 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.
+
+Professor John D. Quackenbos has recently said of Hypnotism:--
+
+     "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 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
+physical 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 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 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 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 investigation 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 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
+
+  "The spirit world around this world of sense
+  Floats like an atmosphere...."
+
+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 tenderness, 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 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
+action on the spiritual side. A thought has the force of a deed, and
+there is a literal truth in the line,--
+
+  "The good, though only thought, has life and breath;"
+
+and in Lowell's words:--
+
+  "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
+
+      "--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 receive the Divine messages
+and to follow the Divine leadings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: A New Force.]
+
+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 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 Quackenbos, 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Service of the Gods.]
+
+"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.
+
+     "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 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
+
+  "... by the Vision splendid
+  Is on his way attended,"
+
+he must give heed to the vision or it vanishes and returns no more.
+
+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,--
+
+  "All is waste and worthless till
+  Arrives the wise selecting will,"
+
+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 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 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. "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,--
+
+  "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 grievous; 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, 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."
+
+Mr. Leadbeater continues:--
+
+     "Still more pregnant of results for good or evil are a man's
+     thought about other people, for in that 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
+psychologists 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.
+
+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 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 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 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.
+
+[Sidenote: Obey the Vision.]
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+  "Success in thyself, which is best of all."
+
+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 manners,"--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
+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 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 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Open Door.]
+
+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 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," 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.
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Interruptions as Opportunities.]
+
+"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 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-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 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 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 "disease," 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 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 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 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 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 irritation 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."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Charm of Companionship.]
+
+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 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 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 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 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."
+
+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 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 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 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 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?"
+
+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, 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: A Summer Pilgrimage in Arizona.]
+
+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 Canyon
+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 "canyon" 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
+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 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 Canyon 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 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 Canyon
+     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 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
+prodigious 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 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 Canyon; inky shadows, pale gildings
+of lofty spires, golden splendors of sun beating full on facades 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 Canyon. Nor can it be painted or photographed, or in any way
+pictorially reproduced in a manner to afford any suggestion, even, of
+its sublimity 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 Canyon in
+Arizona can now be reached by the most luxurious methods of modern
+travelling. From Williams, on the Santa Fe 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 enchanted 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
+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 archaeological 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 Canyon,
+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 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 Canyon 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 canyon
+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 from inscrutable gloom; dreams of
+mountains, as in their sleep they brood on things eternal."
+
+[Sidenote: A Tragic Idyl of Colorado.]
+
+  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; 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,
+education, 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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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.
+
+Mr. Meeker further stipulated:--
+
+"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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 canyon,
+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 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-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.
+
+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.
+
+     "Say not the struggle naught availeth."
+
+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. Unfalteringly, 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: A Remarkable Mystic.]
+
+     "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.... 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+We find her saying:--
+
+     "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 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Momentous Question.]
+
+     "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 emphasis
+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 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?
+
+  "She felt it die a little every day,
+  Flutter more wildly and more feebly pray."
+
+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 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 _re_union and
+_com_munion 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+THE NECTAR OF THE HOUR.
+
+  I share the good with every flower,
+  I drink the nectar of the hour.
+
+                        --EMERSON.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     _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:--
+
+  "I share the good with every flower,
+  I drink the nectar of the hour."
+
+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. 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 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," Pere De Caussade exclaims, "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 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. 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 spiritual 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 Pere 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 Pere De Caussade--one equally entitled to
+consideration--is that God reveals himself to us now, in ordinary
+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 Pere 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.
+
+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."
+
+Pere De Caussade proceeds to say:--
+
+     "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.
+
+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?
+
+"Can the divine will err?" questions Pere 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: A Profound Experience.]
+
+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 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.
+
+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 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,
+    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 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 Pere 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."
+
+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 individual. 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,
+    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 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.
+
+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 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, 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
+fulfilment, 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 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."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Law of Prayer.]
+
+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." 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, 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.
+
+"Anxiety and misgiving," wrote Fenelon, "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 Fenelon,
+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 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, 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 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."
+
+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 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!"
+
+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 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
+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 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 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 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Conduct and Beauty.]
+
+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 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, 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 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 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 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 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
+
+  "Every morn is the world made new."
+
+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?"
+
+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
+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.
+
+  "One's self must never give way--that is the final substance."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: The Divine Panorama.]
+
+"Do we not all wish that we could live our lives over again in the light
+of 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
+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 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 pining:
+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
+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 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 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 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 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.]
+
+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 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,
+anxious, 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," 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 therefore 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 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 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 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
+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
+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 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 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 aspiration. 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 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."
+
+Mrs. Browning has a line in "Aurora Leigh" that runs,--
+
+  "And having tried all other ways, to just try God's."
+
+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 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."
+
+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,--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."
+
+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 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 whatever 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 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 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 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 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 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."
+
+  "I thank whatever gods there be
+  For my unconquerable soul,"
+
+sings William Ernest Henley, and he closes with the ringing lines,--
+
+  "I am the Captain of my fate,
+  I am the master of my soul."
+
+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
+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 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 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 ideal achievement; of entering into that golden
+atmosphere in which he shall not only
+
+  "--dream of summers and dream of flowers
+  That last alway,"
+
+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."
+
+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 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 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" 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 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 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.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+  Abbott, Rev. Dr. Lyman, 83, 223.
+  Academy of Science, 10.
+  Adams, Hon. Alva, his tribute to Nathan Cook Meeker, 248.
+  ----, General, 250.
+  Africa, 230.
+  Albertson, Dr., his invention, 151, 152, 153.
+  Altar of Perpetual Adoration, 19.
+  Ames, Dr. Charles Gordon, his uplifting sermons, 223, 322, 324.
+  Andes, the, 125.
+  Arizona, 205, 226.
+  Armstrong, Gen. Samuel Chapman, 247.
+  Arno, the, 251.
+  Arnold, Sir Edwin, 65, 68.
+  ----, Matthew, 198, 313.
+  Atlantic, the, 125.
+  ---- cable, 116.
+  ---- coast, 92.
+  "Aurora Leigh," 345.
+  Austrian, 135.
+  Avernus, 51.
+  Ayrton, Prof. W. E., 124, 126.
+
+  Babcock, Rev. Dr. Maltbie Davenport, his noble words, 359, 360, 363.
+  Balzac, Honore de, 103.
+  "Banquo," 253.
+  Baptist belief, 169.
+  Beethoven, 228.
+  Behmen, Jacob, 255.
+  Besant, Annie, her theories on Prayer, 298, 299, 300.
+  Bible, the, 126.
+  Bonus, John, 256.
+  Boston, 150, 234.
+  Brewster, Elder, 241.
+  "Bright Angel Trail, The," 233.
+  British Isles, 142.
+  Brooks, Rt. Rev. Dr. Phillips, 31, 53, 62, 183, 192, 204, 267,
+      268, 293, 347.
+  Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 345.
+  ----, Robert, 265, 364.
+  Bunsen, Dr. Robert Wilhelm, 337.
+  Bushnell, Rev. Dr. Horace, 351.
+
+  Cache la Poudre, 244.
+  Carboniferous, 229.
+  Centennial Exhibition, the, 245, 246.
+  Chemical Society, 48.
+  Cheyenne, 240.
+  ---- Canyon, 226, 232, 233.
+  Chicago, 93.
+  Christmas, 242.
+  "Clothed with the Sun," 255.
+  Colorado River, 230.
+  ----, State of, 191, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245,
+      246, 247, 248, 251, 252, 253.
+  Columbia University Chemical Society, 48.
+  Congress, 246.
+  Connecticut, 241.
+  Cooper Institute, 240, 243.
+  Copley Square, 169.
+  Cosmos, the, 140.
+  "Courier Journal," 238, 241.
+  Crookes, Sir William, 9, 11.
+  Crusaders, the, 226.
+  "Culture," 198.
+  Curie, Professor, Radium discovered by, 9, 10.
+  ----, Madame, 9, 10.
+  Cushing, Frank, 235.
+
+  Daniel, Book of, 163.
+  "Daniel Deronda," 222.
+  Dante, 185, 309.
+  "Data of Ethics," 204.
+  Darwin, Dr. Charles, 83.
+  De Caussade, Pere, 275, 280, 281, 284, 290.
+  Denver, 240.
+  Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, 251.
+  Discovery of the Future, 81.
+  Donald, Rev. Dr. E. Winchester, 223.
+  Divine Creation, 171.
+  ---- Love, 206, 288.
+  ---- Perfection, 300.
+  ---- Pressure, 199, 332.
+  ---- Truth, 286.
+  ---- Word, 314.
+  ---- Will, 89, 294.
+
+  Echo Cliffs, 236.
+  Edison, Thomas, 116.
+  Edwards, Jonathan, 171.
+  Egyptian, 80.
+  Eiffel Tower, 226.
+  Electricity, 174.
+  Eliot, President Charles W., 198.
+  Elizabeth, 242.
+  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 32, 40, 42, 45, 49, 61, 78, 81, 93, 175,
+      177, 196, 197, 202, 203, 214, 217, 221, 237, 241, 242, 309,
+      324, 339, 354, 355.
+  Empedocles, 78.
+  England, 256.
+  Episcopalian, 169.
+  Eros, 145.
+  "Esoteric Christianity," 298.
+  Europe, 137, 150.
+  "Evangeline," 250.
+  Evolution, 330.
+  "Expansion of Religion," 223.
+
+  Faraday, Michael, 338.
+  Faust, 49.
+  Fenelon, 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.
+
+  Galilee, 264.
+  Garden of the Gods, 242.
+  German, 334.
+  "Giver of all Good," 320.
+  Goethe, 198.
+  Gogol, 126.
+  Gordon, Rev. Dr. George A., 223.
+  Grand Canyon of the Colorado, 226, 228, 229, 233, 236.
+  Greek, 249.
+  Greeley, Horace, presided at meeting in Cooper Institute, 240;
+    invited Nathan Cook Meeker to place on "Tribune," 241;
+    encouraged founding of town, 243, 248;
+    portrait of, 253.
+  ----, town of, founded by Nathan Cook Meeker, 237, 240;
+    beautiful situation of, 244;
+    interest of, 245, 247.
+  "----, Tribune, The," founding of, 238.
+
+  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.
+
+  Indian, the, 247.
+  Indian Commissioner, 238.
+  Indiana, 205.
+  Indians, legislation for, 246, 248, 249, 250.
+  Isles of Patmos, 226.
+  Italy, 257.
+
+  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, nee Bonus, remarkable mystic writings of, 255;
+    marriage of, 256;
+    theories of, 257, 259;
+    remarkable interpretation of life of, 261.
+
+  Lacordaire, Pere, 229.
+  Lanier, Sidney, 65.
+  Latin, 198.
+  Leadbeater, C. W., 186.
+  Leavenworth, Professor, 144.
+  Lent, 285.
+  Leverrier, Urbain John Joseph, 84.
+  "Life Radiant, The," 3, 5, 6, 16, 24, 25. 26, 37, 348.
+  Lincoln, Abraham 7, 254.
+  Liverpool, 150.
+  Lodge, Sir Oliver, 9;
+    new problems presented, by, 153, 154, 155;
+    his theories regarding telepathy, 157.
+  Loeb, Dr., 25.
+  London, 86, 154, 216.
+  Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 292.
+  Long's Peak, 244.
+  Lot, 202.
+  Louis XV., 149.
+  Lowell Institute, 234.
+  Lowell, James Russell, 170.
+  ----, John, 234.
+  ---- Observatory, 234.
+  ----, Prof. Percival, his astronomical work, 234, 235.
+
+  Maeterlinck, Maurice, the future discussed by, 91, 93, 94, 96;
+    theories of, 98, 101;
+    insights of, 193, 207.
+  Magi, the, 265, 346.
+  Marconi, Guglielmo, genius of, 5, 116;
+    system of, 125;
+    ship detector of, 134;
+    predictions of, fulfilled, 136.
+  Marie Antoinette, 149.
+  Mars, 127, 234.
+  Massachusetts, diocese of, 54.
+  ----, Bishop of, 54.
+  Mayer, Julius Robert von, 338.
+  Meeker, Arvilla Delight, nee Smith (Mrs. Nathan Cook Meeker), 249,
+      250, 252.
+  ----, Nathan Cook, town of Greeley, Colo., founded by, 237;
+    visions of, 238, 239;
+    outlines plans, 240;
+    birth of, 241;
+    editorial work of, praised by Emerson, 242;
+    municipal principles of, 243, 244, 245;
+    appointed commissioner to Centennial Exposition, 246;
+    "The Greeley Tribune" founded by, 246;
+    Indian policy of, 246, 247;
+    difficulties encountered by, 247;
+    massacre of, 247;
+    estimation of, 251, 252;
+    work of, 253;
+    noble ideals of, 254.
+  ----, Josephine, 248, 249, 250, 252.
+  Mesozoic age, 229.
+  Michael Angelo, 228.
+  Mont Pelee, 48, 50.
+  Montana, 205.
+  Morning Star, 204.
+  Mount Etna, 78.
+  ---- of Transfiguration, 88.
+  ---- of Vision, 365.
+  Moxom, Rev. Dr. Philip, 223.
+  Muensterberg, Prof. Hugo, 55.
+  Musee Cluny, the, 149, 150.
+  Myers, Frederic, W. H. 140, 148.
+
+  Nature, 171.
+  Naval Observatory, 127.
+  Neptune, 84.
+  New England, 213.
+  New Jersey, 242.
+  New Jerusalem, 226.
+  New Testament, 148.
+  New Year, the, 203, 204, 320.
+  New York, 240.
+  "New York Herald," 48, 151.
+  "---- Mirror," 241.
+  "---- Tribune," 238.
+  Niagara, 153, 226, 231.
+  Nile, 142
+
+  Observatory, the Minnesota University, 144.
+  Ohio, 241.
+  Orion, 317.
+  Ostwald, Dr., 334.
+
+  Paderewski, Ignace, 340.
+  Paradise, 63.
+  "Paradiso," 226.
+  Paris, 95, 149, 226, 275.
+  Parkhurst, Rev. Dr., 325, 328.
+  "Parsival," 265.
+  Permian, 229.
+  Phillips, Stephen, 145, 263.
+  Pierce, Hon. Franklin, 241.
+  Pike's Peak, 238, 239, 244.
+  Pope, General, 249.
+  Powell, Major John W., 231.
+  Preece, Sir William, 127.
+  Prentice, George D., 241.
+  Presbyterian, 169.
+  Promised Land, 204.
+  Protestant, 274.
+  Prudhomme, Sully, 8.
+  Psychical Research, 141.
+  Pueblo, 248.
+  Pyramids, 142, 143.
+
+  Quackenbos, Dr. John D., 160, 161, 172.
+
+  Reichenbach, Anton Benedict, remarkable experiments of, 135.
+  Roberts, Professor, electrical work of, 153.
+  Robinson, Solon, 241.
+  Rocky Mountains, the, 244.
+  Roentgen 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 Fe 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, nee Beecher, 213.
+
+  Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 87.
+  Tertiary, 229.
+  Tesla, Nicola, 116;
+    discovery of, 122;
+    human energy discussed by, 188.
+  Texas, 205.
+  "The Gleam," 182.
+  "The Inferno," 226.
+  "The Country God Forgot," 234.
+  "The Perfect Way," 255, 256.
+  "The World Beautiful," 25.
+  Thompson, Prof. J. J., 9.
+  Thornburg, Major, 249.
+  Titanic, 226.
+  Trinity Church, 54.
+  Twentieth Century, 198, 264.
+
+  Union Colony, 244, 247, 248, 253.
+  Unitarian, 169.
+  United States, 42.
+  Universe, 109.
+  Unseen, the, 173.
+  Ursa Major, 317, 318.
+  Utah, 228.
+  Utes, the, 247.
+
+  Vatican, the, 256.
+  Vedantic, 332.
+  Vedder, Elihu, 177.
+  "Vita Nuova," 185.
+
+  Walnut Canyon, 235.
+  Warren, Rev. Dr. Walpole, 60.
+  Washington, 127, 246.
+  Washington Monument, 227.
+  Watterson, Col. Henry, 241.
+  Wells, H. G., theories of, on foretelling the future, 81, 83.
+  West, the, 238.
+  Western Reserve, the, 241.
+  Westminster Abbey, 142.
+  White Mountains, the, 48.
+  White River, 238, 247, 251, 261.
+  Whittier, John Greenleaf, 288, 320.
+  Whyte, Rev. Dr. Alexander, 212.
+  Wilberforce, Rev. Dr. Basil, Archdeacon of Westminster, 141, 142.
+  Will of God, 282, 284.
+
+  Young, John Russell, 243.
+
+  Zuni, 235.
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+_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_.
+
+
+The World Beautiful (First Series)
+
+     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_.
+
+
+The World Beautiful (Second Series)
+
+     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_.
+
+
+The World Beautiful (Third Series)
+
+     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_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+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.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHILDHOOD AND CIRCUMSTANCE. An Interesting Heredity; Family Letters; Mr.
+and Mrs. Field's Stage Life; Death of Joseph M. Field; The Mother and
+Daughter.
+
+EARLY YOUTH. Aspirations and Studies; Interest in Art and Literature;
+Ardent Devotion to Music.
+
+FLORENTINE DAYS. At Villa Bellosguardi; Enthusiasm for Italy; George
+Eliot and the Trollopes; Walter Savage Landor; At Casa Guidi with the
+Brownings.
+
+LECTURING AND WRITING. Intense Energy of Purpose; John Brown's Grave;
+Ristori, Fechter, and the Drama; Planchette's Diary; Death of Eliza
+Riddle Field.
+
+EUROPE REVISITED. Among London Celebrities; In Spain with Castelar;
+Music and Drama; Professor Bell and the Telephone; The Shakespeare
+Memorial.
+
+A SIGNIFICANT DECADE. Return to America; Failures and Renewed Effort;
+The Mormon Problem; Alaska and the Golden Gate; Fame and Friends.
+
+"KATE FIELD'S WASHINGTON." A Unique Enterprise; Miss Gilder's
+Friendship; Charming Life in the Capitol; The Columbian Exposition;
+France decorated Kate Field.
+
+CROSSING THE BAR. A Journey of Destiny; Life and Studies in Hawaii;
+Noble and Generous Work; The Angel of Death.
+
+IN RETROSPECT. Universal Appreciation and Love; The Strange Ordering of
+Circumstance; A Sculptured Cross in Mount Auburn; Death only an Event in
+Life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+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
+
+254 Washington Street, Boston, Mass.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE RADIANT***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 23820.txt or 23820.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/3/8/2/23820
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://www.gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
diff --git a/23820.zip b/23820.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..48fd207
--- /dev/null
+++ b/23820.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..74dd96e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #23820 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23820)