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THE LIFE RADIANT

BY

LILIAN WHITING

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

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

a Record," "Boston Days," etc.

"Follow it, follow it,

Follow the Gleam."

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1903

TO

ARVILLA DELIGHT MEEKER

(MRS. NATHAN COOK MEEKER)

IN WHOSE BEAUTIFUL LIFE PATIENCE HAS DONE HER

PERFECT WORK, AND WHOSE UNFALTERING AND

JOYFUL FAITH IN GOD REVEALS IMPRESSIVE

TRUTH IN THE LIFE RADIANT OF

HOLY LIVING

THESE PAGES ARE INSCRIBED WITH

THE DEVOTION OF

LILIAN WHITING

TABLE OF CONTENTS

[THE GOLDEN AGE LIES ONWARD.]
[The Supreme Illumination]
[Creating the New World]
[Eliminating Anxieties]
[Heaven's Perfect Hour]
[Love and Good Will]
[The Diviner Possibilities]
[The Weight of the Past]
[DISCERNING THE FUTURE.]
[A Determining Question]
[In Proportion to Power]
[THE ETHEREAL REALM.]
[A Scientific Fact]
[A Glorious Inauguration]
[Finer Cosmic Forces]
[Health and Happiness]
[A New Force]
[The Service of the Gods]
[THE POWER OF THE EXALTED MOMENT.]
[Obey the Vision]
[The Open Door]
[Interruptions as Opportunities]
[The Charm of Companionship]
[A Summer Pilgrimage in Arizona]
[A Tragic Idyl of Colorado]
[A Remarkable Mystic]
[The Momentous Question]
[THE NECTAR OF THE HOUR.]
[A Profound Experience]
[The Law of Prayer]
[Conduct and Beauty]
[The Divine Panorama]
[Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter]

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 two-fold life. On the visible side he is pushing onward in the excavation of a tunnel; he is laying the track of a new railroad; he is engaged in building a house; he stands at his appointed place in a great factory,—but is this all? His 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.

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.

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."

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."

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!

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.