The House of Sorrow

PROLOGUE

THE traveler looked about him. The glorious sunlight of the preceding day had gone; the glittering greenery that had frolicked with the breeze was no longer to be seen. The trees along the roadside were gnarled, stunted, sombre; the bushes were scarce more than brambles. Bleakness covered everything. Grass, such as it was, showed itself only in patches; the soil was stony, the air chill.

The traveler wrapped his cloak about him. Whether his senses were sharpened by the dreariness of his surroundings, or whether they instinctively sought a new object for their attention, he could not say; but he became aware, gradually, —as a sound sleeper slowly wakes to the things about his bed, — of some one beside him, traveling the same way, taking, it seemed, even steps with himself. He felt no surprise, but rather as if he were picking up a memory that had been lying just under the surface of consciousness, — as if he ought to have known that some one had been beside him for an indefinite time.

The traveler walked on for a while in silence; and then, overcome half by curiosity, half by a mixture of resentment and suspicion, turned and demanded a little curtly where the other was going.

‘I am going your way,’ replied the stranger; and the two walked on together, side by side.

‘ I beg your pardon,’ said the traveler, ‘ but I know, as I am immersed in my own thoughts, that I cannot be an acceptable companion. We had better journey singly; I will go ahead or fall behind, as you choose.’

‘ I prefer to keep even pace,’ answered the other.

Hardly knowing whether or not to be offended, the traveler hesitated; should he go ahead or fall behind? But, though he could not tell why, he did neither; he kept on the same road at the same pace, step by step with his companion.

The landscape grew still more desolate; the earth seemed hostile to vegetable life. A rare tree, here and there, shook its barren branches; prickly things rendered the walking difficult.

The traveler thought to himself: ‘I will turn round and go back, and so I shall both leave this detestable place and escape from this importunate companion.’

The stranger spoke up: ‘No, let us keep on together.’

The traveler started, and, making a feeble attempt to smile, said, ‘You seem to be a mind-reader.’ He decided to stop at once; nevertheless he continued to keep on the same road at the same pace. Then he thought, forgetting that he had not spoken aloud, ‘ It was not polite in me to let him know that I wished to shake myself free of his company. I will quietly turn off to the right or left.’

‘No, let us keep on the same road,’ repeated the stranger.

At this the traveler contained himself no longer, but burst out, almost angrily, ‘Who are you?’

‘I am the Spirit of Life,’ answered the other; ‘you and I are journeying together.’

The traveler did not understand what the stranger meant; but he was aware of a bitter chill in the air and of still greater desolation all about, and he determined to cast manners to the wind and run for it; but no, his feet kept on the same way, at the same pace.

‘Be not impatient,’ said his companion, ‘this is our road.’

The chill struck through the traveler’s cloak, his fingers trembled with cold, but he kept on. As they crossed the brow of a low hill they saw a great, gloomy building lying before them. The traveler thought of fortresses and prisons in foreign lands that he had read of.

‘I shall turn here and go back,’ he cried, amazed at the foolish terror of his imagination.

‘We must go on,’replied the stranger.

They were now close under the shadow of the building.

‘What is this abhorrent place?’ asked the traveler.

‘This,’ answered his companion taking the traveler’s arm, ‘ is the House of Sorrow.’

The traveler felt a sword pierce his heart, yet his footsteps did not fail; for, against his will, the Spirit of Life bore him up. He went on with even step, and the two crossed the threshold.

I

They that have experienced a great sorrow are born again. The world they are now in is quite different from their old world. In that earlier world they lived upon terms of household familiarity with Joy and Felicity; now they must lie down by the side of Sorrow and eat with Sorrow beside them at the board. Outward things may assert their identity to eye, to ear, to touch, but outward things cannot deceive the spirit within; the House of Sorrow is strange, all its furniture is strange, and the newcomer must learn anew how to live.

The first lesson is to accept the past as a beautiful day that is done, as the loveliness of a rose that has withered away. The object of our yearning has passed from the world of actual contacts into the world of art. Memory may paint the picture as it will, drop out all shadows and catch the beauty of our exquisite loss in all the golden glow of human happiness. There, within the shrine prepared by Sorrow, that picture will ever refresh us and bless us. Evil cannot touch it, nor ill-will, nor envy, nor sordid care; only our own faithlessness, our own acceptance of unworthy things, can stain the freshness of its beauty. Sorrow has constituted us the sacristans of this shrine; on us rests the care of this pictured relic, and, unless we suffer motes and beams to get in our eyes, it will remain as bright in the sanctuary of memory as in the sunshine of earthly life.

The second lesson is to receive from Sorrow the gift that we have all asked for, begged for, a thousand times. We have felt the oppression of petty things, we have been caught in the nets of grossness, we have suffered ourselves to become captives and servants to the common and the mean, till, weary with servitude, we have cried out, ‘Oh, that I might rescue my soul! ’ And now the work of deliverance is accomplished and our souls are free. Tyranny has fallen from our necks. Vulgar inclinations have lost their ancient glamour, and the baser appetites shiver in their nakedness. Our wish has been granted; the prison doors are open wide, we may pursue with all our strength, with all the resolution we can summon, the things that we, when bound, believed that we longed for.

The third gift of Sorrow is that she will not suffer us to put up with artificial lights. We had been content with the candle-light of sensuous things, letting our souls float idly on the clouds of chance experience; we had accepted life as a voyage down a magic river of random happenings, satisfied with such beacons as guarded our temporal prosperity. But Sorrow, with one sweep of her hand, has extinguished all those lights, and robbed the things of sense of all their shimmering. Sorrow has shown us that we live in the dark; and no great harm has been done, for we no longer care to see the flickering lights that once flared about our heads with so deceptive a glow. Sorrow has given us a yearning for inextinguishable light. All is dark; but all darkness is one great supplication for light which cannot be quenched. Shadow, mystery, blackness, the outer and the inner courts of chaos, all echo Sorrow’s cry for light.

So the soul into which the iron has entered, amazed and offended by the bitterness of agony, turns to find some light, some principle, whose shining shall illume for her these random happenings of joy and sorrow which make up what we call life, whose wisdom shall satisfy her passionate demand for some explanation why she should have been conjured up out of nothingness, to be caressed and flattered for a season, and then stabbed to the heart. What is this universe that treats us so? What animates it? What is it trying to do ? What is its attitude toward man?

Who shall explain these things? We have lost the support of the Christian dogmas, and we have no new staff to lean upon; we have strayed from the old road of hope, and we do not find a new road. What can science or philosophy do for us, — science that pays so little heed to the soul, philosophy that pays so little heed to grief? We must shift for ourselves and see what we can find. Happiness left us content with happiness, but Sorrow bids us rise up and seek something divine.

The first act must be to take our eyes from Sorrow, cast memory loose, put on the magic cap of indifference and forgetfulness, and look out as from a window upon the phenomena that may chance to meet the eye, and see whether from the sample we can infer a pattern, interwoven with a thread of hope, for the whole fabric.

II

I look at the universe as it presents itself to me this morning, as if I, for the first time, were making its acquaintance. I find myself in a pleasant room. Golden light, pouring in at the window, irradiates shining breakfast things. A wonderful odor greets my nostrils; a steaming fragrance, followed by a delicious taste, quickens my whole being. Next, round, yellow fruit is presented to me, smelling as if it remembered all its blossoming origins or had packed its rind with ambrosia in the garden of the Hesperides. Added to these is a delicious bread, rich Rembrandtesque brown without, ripe yellow within, a princely kind of bread, which they tell me is called Johnny-cake.

Breakfast done, I walk out into an unroofed azure palace of light. Upon the ground a multitude of little green stalks intertwine with each other to keep my feet from touching the soil beneath; mighty giants, rooted to earth, hold up a hundred thousand leaves to shelter me from the excess of golden glory that illumines the azure palace; the leaves rustle, either for the music’s sake or to let me feel their sentiment of kinship. Further on, little beautiful things, which have renounced locomotion, — recognizing that they have found their appointed places and are happy there, like the Lady Pia in the lower heaven of Paradise, — waft floral benedictions to me. And about them hover winged flowers that spread their petals to the breeze and flit from fragrance to fragrance. Into a honey-laden cornucopia, a passionate presence, its wings humming in wild ecstasy, dips its bill, while the sunlight furnishes the jeweled magnificence of its plumage.

A troop of young creatures, far more wonderful than these, passes by, with glancing eyes and rosy cheeks, making sweetest music of words and laughter. These, they tell me, are children, and they say that there are many of them, and that I, too, was once a child. I laugh at this preposterous flattery.

Another being, well-nigh ethereal, a naiad perhaps, or the imagining of some kindly god, trips by. It is exquisite. The leaves cast their shadows before it; the flowers tremble for pleasure. ‘ What is it?’ I whisper. Some one answers carelessly: ‘That is a maiden.’

Then another young creature dances by, — head erect, all animation, the breeze blowing its hair back from what must be a temple for pure and noble thought — like a gallant ship beating out to sea. This, they tell me, is a youth.

I walk on and behold many goodly things. I hear melodies that stir yearnings to which I can give no name, start flashes of joy, or glimmering understandings of the ‘deep and dazzling darkness’ that surrounds the farthest reaches of terrestrial light. I am told that there are men, called poets, who have built a palace out of their crystal imaginations, where life and its doings are depicted in a thousand ways, sometimes as in a mirror, trait, for trait, sometimes glorified, and all in varied cadences of music. And I am told that the wonderful things which greet my senses — dry land and its fruitfulness, ocean, air, clouds, stars, and sky — are but an infinitesimal fragment of an infinite whole, in which the curious mind may travel for countless ages and never reach the end of eager and throbbing questionings; that there is between me and it the most wonderful of all relations, the contact, real or imaginary, of my consciousness with the great stream of phenomena that passes before it, and that this relation is the source of neverending intellectual pleasure.

But more than by all things else I am impressed by the sentiments between creatures of my kind, between mother and son, father and daughter, husband and wife, friend and friend, a wonderful mutual attraction which makes each yield his will to the other and rouses a double joy, — from securing for the other and from renouncing for one’s self, — a half-mystical bond that holds two together as gravitation holds terrestrial things to the earth, so sweet, so strong, so delicate, that the imagination cannot rise beyond this human affection at its height.

Such is the fragment of the universe which presents itself at this moment to my consciousness. Bewildered by wonders heaped on wonders, I cry out triumphantly, ‘Is there not evidence of friendliness to man here?’

III

But popular teachers answer, No. In the beginning, they say, in the dark backward of time beyond our ken, is chaos, a wild whir of primal matter in the clutch of primal energy, nebulous substance rotating through space, condensing according to laws immutable. Æons pass and stars emerge. In one corner of immensity the nebulous substance of our planetary system revolves and concentrates. Without pausing in its eternal course, substance shrinks and consolidates into a sun and his attendant satellites, gases condense to liquids, liquids to solids. Our particular planet, a poor relation of the distant stars, once molten, has gradually cooled, its vapors condensing into water, its earthen crust gradually thickening and hardening; matter always rearranging itself, energy always in agitation.

Then, somehow, out of the inorganic mass of matter, emerge, perhaps in the depths of ocean, rocked into wakening by the oscillations of the water, the first rudiments of organic life. Then life, like a flame, catches what fuel it can; it creeps from vegetable to vegetable, mounting always to more elaborate forms; it pauses and hesitates upon the fringed borders between vegetable and animal life, then kindles afresh and bursts up in animal creation. In long succession type succeeds type. The flame leaps from lower structure to higher, animating sponges, corals, shellfish, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, fourfooted beasts, apes, men. So the vital fire has mounted higher and higher.

And as part of the process by which it came creeping up, this vital fire quickened the cells of which organic forms consist. It imparted a sensibility, a capacity for comradeship, by which the cells became aware of the outside world; it endowed them with sundry movements of attraction and distaste. As the cells prospered and multiplied, their interest in outside things increased; they made acquaintance with light, heat, electrical forces, and all the various prowling energies which reveal themselves to man. In certain spots a special sensitiveness entered into closer communication with the outer world; the importunities of the outer world compelled a division of labor in receiving messages, until the separate nerves for smell, taste, sound, light, heat, touch, sitting at their wicket gates, receive the thousands of messages which come to them.

But in the long course of evolution one moment stands easily supreme. In the living organism sensations quickened, activities increased, closer and closer relations between the cells were established by industrious filaments, better and better paths were prepared for postal nerves, until communications became so varied, so quick, so vivifying, that an instrument was created like a mirror, like recording tablets; the vital flame leaped into conscious life. In course of time the nervous system expanded and developed, until in the brain of Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, images arise which add new regions of beauty to the universe.

After this fashion, roughly speaking, we are told, the electron, the atom, the molecule, the cell, have gradually shaped this visible universe, this heaven fretted with golden fire, this earth with its sapphire seas set in floral greenery, this race of man with his inquiring intellect and his hungry heart. Blind chemical and physical forces, after infinite experiments, after infinite failures and beginnings again, proceeding on their predetermined way, have wrought all that there is. They have created that which delights the heart of man, and with equal indifference the poisonous causes which wipe out all his delight forever.

We, the ignorant, listen as best we can to the words of popular science. We feel our incompetence, our ignorance, our inability to appreciate what we are taught. But to us an enumeration of processes and stages does not seem to be an explanation; that enumeration sounds as hollow to us as if science were to explain our personal existences by recounting every step our feet have taken since we first set foot to floor. Moreover men of science bewilder us by their respect, pushed almost to obsequiousness, for size and distance, for chemical energy and physical restlessness. Why should consciousness, ‘the roof and crown of things,’ toady to unself-conscious magnitude, why should it duck and bend before unconscious energy? And where is the explanation or understanding of our two worlds, more real to us than ponderable matter or restless energy, our world of happiness and our world of sorrow?

We turn for enlightenment to the Spirit of Life; but the Spirit of Life answers : —

‘My concern is with life, not with knowledge.’

‘Whom, then, shall we ask?’

‘Ask Pain and ask Love,’ replies the Spirit of Life.

IV

Like little Jack Horner, science pulls out its plums, — electricity, radium, the chemical union of elements, the multiplication of cells,— and, like Jack, congratulates itself. But to the inmates of the House of Sorrow, far more wonderful than all these things, far more mysterious, and demanding subtler thought from philosophy, is human affection. For a generation past, human affection has been treated, and for years to come may still be treated, as the superfluous product of physicochemical energies. The scientific mind, elated by its victories, bivouacs on the old fields of battle. But the real interest in atom and cell lies in the human consciousness, and the interest in consciousness lies in the human affections. In themselves atoms and cells are neither wonderful nor interesting; they are merely strange, and can claim only the attention due to strangers. But human love is of boundless interest to man, and should have the pious devotion of the wisest and most learned men.

Science proceeds as if the past were the home of explanation; whereas the future, and the future alone, holds the key to the mysteries of the present. When the first cell divided, the meaning of that division was to be discovered in the future, not in the past; when some prehuman ancestor first uttered a human sound, the significance of that sound was to be interpreted by human language, not by apish grunts; when the first plant showed solicitude for its seed, the interest of that solicitude lay in the promise of maternal affection. Things must be judged in the light of the coming morning, not of the setting stars.

It is not the past which, like an uncoiling spring, pushes us on; creation faces the future, and is drawn onward by an irresistible attraction. ‘For though it be a maxim in the schools, says Thomas Traherne, ’that there is no love of a thing unknown, yet I have found that things unknown have a secret influence on the soul, and, like the centre of the earth unseen, violently attract it. We love we know not what. . . . As iron at a distance is drawn by the loadstone, there being some invisible communications between them, so is there in us a world of love to somewhat, though we know not what. . . . There are invisible ways of conveyance by which some great thing doth touch our souls, and by which we tend to it. Do you not feel yourself drawn by the expectation and desire of some Great Thing?’

Life seems to have differentiated itself, developing a Promethean spirit within a grosser element. Life as a whole cares only to preserve itself, it seeks to live, it cringes and will accept existence on any terms, it will adapt itself to desert or dung-hill; but the Promethean spirit seeks a higher and a higher sphere. This life within life — this cor cordium of existence—is surely traveling on a definite road. The very passion with which it takes its direction, its readiness to seize on pain and use to the full pain’s ennobling properties, are our assurance that life follows an instinct within that guides it to that which is either its source or its full fruition. We must interpret the seed by the flower, not the flower by the seed. We must interpret life by its deepest attributes, by pain and by love.

Pain has been explained as an accompaniment of the Promethean spirit of life, which, in precipitate haste to proceed upon its journey, takes the most ready and efficacious path onward, heedless of what it breaks and crushes on the way. But pain is rather an impulse within the spirit of life. Pain is its conscience urging it on. Unless we were pricked on by pain, we should wish to stand still, content with our own satisfaction, meanly indifferent to higher pleasures; without pain all life might have been content to house itself in low animal forms, and wallow in bestiality, ease, and lust. It may be that the onward progress might have been accomplished without pain; we might have been whirled upward, insensible, toward the universal goal. But we have received the privilege of consciously sharing in the upward journey, so that each onward movement must be a wrench from the past, each moment a parting, each step an eternal farewell. These noble inconstancies are tasks imposed by pain.

In its humblest capacity pain serves as a danger signal for the body’s health, or as punishment for precautions neglected ; even here, however, it is more spiritual than corporeal, for it is the means by which the soul arouses the body to perpetual vigilance in the service of Life. Pain must concern itself with corporeal things, because consciousness is dependent upon the body; it must discharge its share of the general tribute that consciousness, as a dependency, pays to the body. But such services as pain may render in the material world cannot account for all pain; they cannot account for the heartache, for the depth and breadth of anguish, for the sombre majesty of grief. An explanation must be sought elsewhere.

Pain is a function of the soul; it fosters the preservation and spiritual growth of conscious life. The pangs of conscience, the agony of the heart, nourish the tenderer elements of consciousness; they root out the docks and darnels of worldly pleasure, and so protect the little nurslings of the spirit that would else have been choked, nursing them with passion and tears, as Nature nurses with sunshine and with rain.

No man can say by what means inorganic matter brought forth organic creation, what directing Power called together its gaseous ministers, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, and imposed on them the duty of producing a new thing in the universe; nor can we say how the corporeal organism, seemingly content with processes of material decomposition and reintegration, generated mind. These great deeds were done in the dark, they have left no witnesses; but we have the testimony of our feelings that some momentous change, comparable to these great changes, is even now taking place, however slow its progress may be. Consciousness, in its own ideal world, is seething with independent vitality, eager to develop itself, eager to give birth to a more spiritual state, eager to help Life take another great onward step. The excesses of pain, that serve no corporeal purpose, seem to be caused by the violent efforts of the Spirit of Life in its struggles to take such a step; but, in reality, pain is the cause rather than the effect.

Charged, therefore, with such possibilities in the service of Life, pain — its capacities little taxed by duties of guardianship and nurture — rises to nobler offices; it gradually becomes a closer and closer companion to Life, it twines its tendrils round the tree of Life, it grafts itself on like a branch, and becomes incorporate with Life itself, an essential element in vital energy, a function of some vital, spiritual organ. Yet this organ is not yet established at a definite task, for at times pain seems to be the trenchant edge of the Life spirit, cutting and purging the soul from whatever may impede her upward progress; at times, in the soul’s more tranquil moods, pain seems to be a homesickness for the home that Life aspires to create. Moreover, pain partakes of the vast variety of Life; it announces the prick of a needle on the finger, or sweeps over the soul in the beauty of tragedy with awe-inspiring flight. Science, which deals with the things that are past, unable to fit pain into utilitarian categories, repeats its vaso-motor formulas; but faith, which deals with things that are to be, hails it as the prophet of a new heaven and a new earth. What better explanation of pain is there, than that it is the birth pangs of spirit, the assurance of new things unseen?

In this work of lifting life to a higher stage, pain is but one of many ministers, the most terrible, the most efficient. All the forces of life work to that end. The struggle for life, often ascribed to the egotism of the individual, is not properly so ascribed. That struggle is undertaken in obedience to the law of upward progress. Each vegetable and animal is in honor bound to carry on its individual life to the uttermost, for who can tell before the event what road Life will take upon its upward journey. Each is bound to prevent life from taking the wrong road. The acorn, the seed of the dandelion, the spawn of the herring, the manchild, must hold themselves always ready to carry Life upon the next onward stage; each claims the honor for itself and chooses to kill and to risk death rather than forego the chance of such supreme dignity. In the struggle for self-preservation lies the fulfillment of the creature’s allegiance to life. The struggle for life means pain inflicted and pain received; but in pain lies the honor of the organic world. We cannot imagine nobility or dignity without pain. Lower things do not experience it. Common men always flee from it and execrate it; but, now and then, here and there, men and women seek it out. They may quiver in agony, they may succumb momentarily to the weakness of the flesh, but they bear witness that pain is good. For them pain is the ploughing and harrowing which must precede seed-time and harvest. These men we have been taught to call saints and heroes. Shall we give no weight to their testimony?

As it is with pain, so is it with human love. Each is a turning toward the light ahead. The mutual attraction of cells has no meaning till it appears as the first effort of nature on her way to produce human affection. At every stage in the drawing together of cells and multiples of cells, whether in polyp, reptile, or ape, the significance of that drawing together lies in that for which it is preparing the way. So, too, is it with human affections: they shine with a light not their own, but reflected from the higher significance of the future. Our love is but a pale anticipation of that love which the universe is striving to round out to full-orbed completeness. Love, at least, offers an explanation of the goal of life, — life struggling to consciousness, consciousness rising to love. All other things find their explanation in something higher, but love is its own fulfillment.

Love has no doubts. To itself love is the very substance of reality. The phenomena of sight, sound, touch, and their fellows, are but the conditions under which life has made a foothold for itself in this boisterous world; the senses know nothing beyond their own functioning, they have nothing to say regarding the end or purpose of life. But to love,— all the labor and effort of all the universe, with all its sidereal systems, with all its ethereal immensity, has been for the sake of producing love. Of what consequence is it, whether insensible matter endure a myriad years, or assume infinite bigness? In the absence of consciousness, an infinity of matter is as nothing. One flash of conscious life illumined by love is worth all the patience, all the effort, all the labor, of unconscious energy throughout an infinity of time. Consciousness is but a minister to love, to the love that is to be.

Science, with its predilection for sensuous things, for enumerations, classifications, explanations in terms of matter and energy, asserts that consciousness fulfils no useful function at all. Consciousness is an accidental creation, shot out like a random spark by the friction of living, a sort of tramp who has stolen a ride on the way. According to this theory the musician would continue to play his fiddle whether he produced a melody or not; the endless chain of propulsions from behind would impel one hand to finger the strings, the other to ply the bow. But to the non-scientific man, consciousness is the achievement to which the Universe has bent all its energies.

Had the Universe taken a different turn, or had it neglected the things which it has done, consciousness as we know it would never have come into being. But consciousness has come, and the assertion that it is a superfluous thing, an accident, seems to have been hatched from the very willfulness of arrogance. Because science—a virtuoso in motion, in attractions and repulsions — has not yet discovered the function of consciousness, is it not premature to say that consciousness has no function? To the common mind the obvious function of consciousness—in addition to the minor occupations which its genesis from matter has imposed upon it — is to experience love, and thereby give a reasonable meaning to the Universe.

If matter, or energy, has succeeded in creating consciousness, even though only on our planet and in such little measure, may it not be that after other æons of restless activity, consciousness in its turn shall generate another state of being to which science (then absorbed by a predilection for consciousness, as it is now absorbed by its predilection for sensuous things) will deny any useful function, but which shall justify itself as consciousness does to-day? May it not be — if we let ourselves listen to the incantations of hope — that this higher spiritual sensitiveness, generated by consciousness, will create as much difference between the new order of creatures that shall possess it and ourselves, as there is now between us and inorganic matter? Does not the experience of those men who — in daily life scarce realizing material things — have felt themselves rapt into the presence of God, point to some such inference? ‘When love has carried us above all things . . . we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us and penetrating us,’But whatever our laboring, sweating Universe may bring forth, this seems to be the direction it has taken, the goal that it has set before itself.

Is it not odd that men should continue to interpret love in terms of the atom and the cell, of chemistry and physics, when the whole significance of all the doings of matter and energy comes from our human consciousness?

But shall they that suffer pain today, that have once lived in the Eden of love, shall these enter into the light of the day that is to dawn?

EPILOGUE

THE traveler sighed, lost in perplexity; and the Spirit of Life said, ‘Come, let us walk in the courts of the House of Sorrow.’ So they walked through the courts, and the newcomer beheld in the House a great multitude of windows, most of which were dark, as if there was no light within, or, as if the curtains were drawn and the shutters closed. But other windows shot forth rays of light, some faint and feeble, some stronger, while others poured forth a flood of brightness.

‘Why are some of the windows so bright?’ inquired the newcomer; and the Spirit of Life answered, ‘Those are the windows of the light-bearers; their inmates burn lights, some more, some less.’

‘ With what do they feed their lights ? ’ asked the newcomer.

‘A few shine of their own nature,’answered the Spirit, ‘as if they drew upon an inexhaustible source within; but most of them burn the oil of hope.’

‘If they have no hope, what then?’ asked the newcomer.

‘Then,’said the Spirit, ‘they must make their light from pain. There is an old saying, “He that doth not burn, shall not give forth light.” The past lightened you with its brightness; but by your own shining you must lighten the present and the future. Hope gives the readier light; but even if hope fail, none need leave their windows dark, for where you have pain at your disposal, unlimited pain, it should not require great spiritual ingenuity to use that pain for fuel.’

The newcomer bowed his head, and the Spirit of Life led him to his appointed room within the house.