Some Meditations of the Heart

LAST night, as I was thinking intently about the spirit of God within each one of us, and especially of that spirit as within myself, a curious, quite definite feeling came over me as though I had entered into another country, flowed out into something wider — passed, as it were, to another plane. There was nothing strained or unnatural about it, nor was there the slightest mental confusion. I was perfectly aware of myself, and of the surroundings of my room; but the point of consciousness appeared to have slipped from my head to my heart, from thought to emotion perhaps.

‘This is the Country of the Heart!’ I found myself exclaiming. It was a further glimpse of an experience I had several months ago; which was half a dream, and half the thoughts following immediately upon awakening. In the dream part I saw a sort of field, or prairie, dotted over with what appeared to be the burrows of animals leading into the ground. But I seemed to know that in reality these were not animals’ runs, but were human personalities, through which if one walked one would emerge into another world. I waked then, but still strong upon me was the belief, brought back from the illuminating depths of sleep, that every human being is a gateway into another world, a world which we enter by walking through ourselves; that is, by sinking deeper, and deeper into ourselves, pressing open one door of consciousness after another. I am convinced that there is a wonderful world, a wider, richer life, a more intense joy and beauty close at hand, — almost in touch of us, — which our blind eyes and blinder hearts have not the grace to perceive. As we plod along our anxious road, we never lift up our eyes to it, or open our ears to its melody. And yet sometimes our hearts tell us in a vague wistfulness that we have missed the way — have somehow wandered from the path, and are very far from home.

When I sit on the porch of an evening in late summer, the air is filled with the rasping of the katydids. There they are in the locust trees, almost in hand’s reach of me, and yet we are in two different worlds. I have some small knowledge of their world, but what have they of mine? They might, indeed, entirely deny my very existence. Yet there we are out in the same summer night, side by side! Just as I am close to the katydids, so I believe that there is another world, and other beings as close to me, of whose existence I guess as little as those jolly green fiddlers in the locust trees guess of mine.

This world which I believe to be there, just beyond the gray veils of our present consciousness, I have chosen to call the Country of the Heart. Every now and again we catch glimpses of it, and know that if we might enter in, we should not find ourselves, as here, strangers and wanderers, but spirits returned to our larger selves, in the place where we belong, unutterably and exquisitely at home.

These more or less random notes which I have jotted down from time to time mark the stages of a quest after this life more abundant. They offer little that is definite, I fear; yet those who are set upon the same road will affirm with me the beauty of the journey, knowing, as I have known, some lovely fleeting moments when that country seems very near, and when in its halfseen radiance the dust and weariness of travel vanish away, and in a vivid uprush of loyalty, the spirit rededicates itself to the great adventure.

Some people, I think, go through three periods of youth: physical, mental, and spiritual. The body comes first to its adolescence; then the mind; and then, last of all, the spirit. Sometimes there comes a late unexpected flowering of the soul when all possibility of further development is apparently over. To my astonishment (for I had supposed that youth was certainly passed), I find myself experiencing now a spring-tide more wonderful, more lovely and more rich in promise, than any that I have ever known: it is, I think, the spring-tide of the spirit.

Every morning, in the freshness of awakening, God presents me with a lovely ideal or possibility for my life, like a master setting a child its copy; and every evening I bring it back to Him, so defaced and blotted with being lived that only God himself would ever have the patience to set me a fresh copy.

Yesterday I broke off a gourd-blossom with a cluster of buds at the base of the flower on the same stem, and took it to my study to examine. It was a lovely bright yellow, with the petals crinkled all over except for a smooth highway down the centre of each, which I took to be the bee’s highway leading to the honey-cups in the blossom’s throat. These gourd-blossoms have no floral envelope. The bud simply expands and opens into the flower without having to push through a bud sheath. When the bud is small it is green; but as it grows it changes color, so that when fully expanded it is a lovely, ecstatic shade of wild yellow, except for faint green veins down the back of each petal.

Although I noticed all this at the time, the wonder of it did not strike me until much later in the day, when a realization of the miracle of the little buds turning from green to yellow came to me all at once. I wondered what made the color stop being green at the right moment and run to a flood of gorgeous full-blown yellow. The little buds are always green, the expanded flowers always yellow. Never a slip, never a yellow bud and a green flower. Always that bit of silent adjustment takes place in the little gourdblossom just at the right time. No maiden on her wedding day is so tenderly, exquisitely cared for by her mother as that little green bud is cared for when God sees that always, when the time comes, her little-girl kirtle of green is changed to her nuptial yellow. No little bud grows up to maidenhood without receiving from Him her lovely bridal gown. And so in different ways He sees to the betrothal dresses of all the other little buds in my garden and in all the world as well.

I had had a happy day, and some of my reading had opened doors into a closer understanding of God’s love; but the crown of my happiness was the little gourd-flower’s wedding dress. That so moved me — so made ‘my heart to leap up’ — that when I went to bed my whole being poured itself out in my prayers in a flood of love and gratitude. And all because a little flower turns from green to yellow at just the right moment! Somehow the thought of it melted my very heart of hearts.

‘God reveals Himself to Himself in Nature, and in the finite spirits He has made in his own image.’ This being true, would it not be an added argument for the survival of our personality after death? If we were entirely merged in God we should not only lose our own self-consciousness, but He would also lose some of his self-consciousness, if all separateness were wiped away.

‘For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son.’ It occurred to me suddenly that in saying that He gave his only begotten Son, Jesus might have meant that God had given his Son — the Logos, Himself incarnate in the world — from the very beginning of the world’s creation. That the Son, on account of the Father’s love, had always been giving Himself to the world — always, from the very first. And when he spoke thus, Jesus was not speaking of his own incarnation, but of that which had been present in the world ever since the world began. His incarnation was a symbol — a gathering up of the whole — of that incarnation which had always been there.

I sometimes think that we are to God as his fingers are to a blind person. Through us He feels of life in all its manifold experiences. Through some of us He feels of happiness, and through some He feels of pain. It consoled me somewhat, when I was unhappy, to think that perhaps He was feeling of suffering through me. Before being born some of us may have volunteered for this service — volunteered, that is, to come into the world and be the fingers through which God shall feel of suffering.

The fingers and the palm of the hand seem to me a good symbol of our relationship to God. We are all separate and distinct, and yet all rooted in Him, and spring from Him, as our fingers are rooted in, and spring from, our palm.

I was up early this morning and went out of doors. Everything was very beautiful in the early morning light, with the autumn haze just beginning. It was all exquisitely still, flowers and vines and trees lifting themselves up into the still air; yet I had a feeling that beneath all that stillness was an intense activity. There was, of course, all the business of growth and fruition that is going on constantly; but the underlying activity that I seemed conscious of was something more and other than that.

At first I felt as though all this sense of intense, busy stillness was like a top spinning so hard that it appeared motionless. Perhaps this was suggested by the half-unconscious thought of our world whirling so vividly through space. But the feeling of busy stillness was not quite that, either; and then it came to me that possibly the flowers and trees and all the growing children were busy about the same thing that I was. I was sitting there absolutely quiet, yet my whole heart was flowing out of me in an intense transcendent love and delight. Perhaps this was just what that busy stillness of the flowers meant, also. Perhaps they were lifting themselves up to Him in adoration, just as I was. This seems to me really possible —though perhaps not probable. With me, at such times, self-consciousness drops away, to a certain extent, in an act of worship. Self-consciousness gives way, as it were, to a love-consciousness. We do not think that flowers have any selfconsciousness, but may they not have this love-consciousness instead? At the heart of life is God’s love and joy, and may it not be that flowers are rooted in this consciousness? Is it not rather God’s consciousness in them? Whichever it is, the love and joy are there. If the flowers feel this way their whole growth, from first shoot to leaf, bud, full blossom and seed-vessel, is an act of joyous, loving worship. They lift their faces up in his love all the time. I hope this is true, for then they must be very happy.

I have often a feeling as though plants and trees are enclosed in a curious element, like plants submerged in water. Something that encloses them, and with which they are in loving touch —I feel them like this, I almost see them like this — that is, with the eyes of emotion. I do not always experience this — only occasionally. I know within myself just what I mean by this sensation about flowers and trees, but I cannot find the words exactly to convey the idea. They seem to be standing up — stretching up — in some great element, and the element seems to be dimly connected with rhythm. I believe it is because ‘everything is enveloped in God.’ This is the truth, I think, but the mere statement of it does not at all convey to the mind what it is like to see it. I think I never have this sensation except on days when I am happy.

The higher we get in the scale of development, the further we seem to get away from Him. This is because our own self-consciousness — our trying, as it were, to manage things for ourselves — confuses our consciousness of Him.

Plants have probably very little of this individual consciousness, and perhaps animals have not much more. But a struggling surrender of ourselves to Him is, of course, a much higher life than the plant’s and animal’s life in Him, because they are not capable of any consciousness away from Him. ‘Our wills are ours to make them Thine.’ To us has been given the privileged unhappiness of having wills of our own, with the possibility of unspeakable happiness if we bring our wills into conformity with his.

One may find God everywhere, but for us human beings, his especial trysting place is within our own hearts.

We are tempted at times, perhaps, to look with contempt on the groping of certain people after God and goodness; but when we realize that God is the Instigator, although the gropings may sometimes seem fantastic and pathetic enough, the impulse we can only regard with supreme reverence. The reaching out may be inadequate enough, but the impulse to reach out is the inspiration of all the law and the prophets, the root of all religion, the very breath of our souls. We know that God is constantly ‘touching’ our own hearts, and we realize with our minds that as He speaks to us, so He must speak also to other people. If we would not only realize this with our minds, but take it into our very hearts and live it passionately, it might teach us how, in deed and in truth, to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Evelyn Underhill — in her Introduction to the Songs of Kabir — says,

‘ More absolute than the Absolute, more personal than the human mind, Brahma therefore exceeds, whilst He includes, all the concepts of philosophy, all the passionate intuitions of the heart. He is the great affirmation, the font of energy, the source of life and love, the unique satisfaction of desire.’ The absolute truth is so tremendous that it appears to me He must contain truth enough to include all the genuine creeds. Though my creed appears to be absolutely different from my neighbor’s, yet if they both feel true — if something deep within me says that what I believe is true, and if something equally deep within him says that what he believes is true — then may it not be that we have both found some of the truth? And although our truths may seem absolutely contradictory, still there is undiscovered truth enough in the whole to cover all beliefs, and to reconcile the most opposite. It is the old story of two blind men feeling of different parts of the same elephant, and each reporting it as an absolutely different animal. But I think it is more like the sun shining through a prism. The sun is the whole truth, but the human mind — the prism — breaks it up into different colors. The colors seem absolutely different from one another, but the sun contains the elements of them all. So truth may contain at least a germ of all the creeds. It is not so hard, perhaps, to reconcile the different beliefs as to reconcile the different actions to which they lead. Nor is it so difficult to reconcile the beliefs as to reconcile the believers. ‘God seen through a temperament.’

As we cannot escape from life, it may be possible that we cannot escape from truth either. That is, it may be absolutely impossible for us to think any thought that does not have an element of truth in it; that we could not think it unless it had some truth in it. It is not possible, perhaps, for us to conceive anything that is not true. All our speculations, even the wildest ones, may be true. What makes the truth run false in our minds may be the fact that we find it, but don’t find enough of it. It is as yet, and perhaps it may always be, impossible for us to force enough truth at one time into our finite minds to give us a complete interpretation of the whole. Perhaps what we want to struggle against is not untruth — for there may be no such thing — but a too limited truth. If truth is so all-embracing that we cannot conceive a thought outside of it, then all our attempts to find it are as amusing as though a solemn young fish — all the time swimming about in it — should announce that his high mission was to find the ocean; that he believed that there was such a thing, and that if he earnestly devoted himself to the quest he might discover it. The really impossible thing for him would be, not to find the ocean, but to find anything else. So it may be as impossible for our thoughts to reach beyond the truth as it is for a fish to live out of water.

When I pray for people I am fond of, most of my deepest prayers do not ask anything definite for them. I just think of them affectionately, and on the wings of my love, as it were, I bear them up into God’s presence and hold them there, by a sort of will of affection, to be filled by his love. Of course I believe that we are already in the midst of God’s love, but I have, nevertheless, a happy feeling that this lifting of my friends up to Him by love does serve them in some way. Perhaps my love for them makes a medium, or atmosphere, through which his love can more easily work in them. How our affection for one another helps, anyway! I sometimes find in my writing that my thoughts come most happily when I imagine myself talking with people whom I love. Holding in my heart a realization of their affection and comprehending appreciation seems to make a warm, happy pathway along which ideas flow naturally.

I think that there is much more in this idea than mere imagination. Love is, I am sure, more really creative than we realize. Sexual love does of course create; but I wonder if that fact may not be also a symbol of the creative power of all love? I would rather have the gift of tremendous outpouring affection — love of God, and love of humanity — than any other gift in all the world. I desire it more than anything else. And yet, even at those Heaven-sent periods when my heart is full of love, how hard it is to express it! Of course, this is partly shyness — that curious, hampering mantle of reserve in which we are forever hastening to wrap our spirits. How timid and anxious our little self is! Our spirit-self is forever shocking it! The stiff conventional self is constantly trying to cover up the spirit self — like a proper middle-aged nurse pursuing a happy care-free baby who has adventured forth with too few clothes on.

O beloved people in all the world! ‘Let us love one another for love is of God, and everyone that loveth is born of God, for God is love,’

God is love. I wish that those three words could be stamped all over the heart of every human being in the world and out of the world.

Yesterday a flower from a primrose plant in the window had dropped off, and I picked it up to look at before throwing it away. It was an exquisite rosy-lavender, inexpressibly lovely and appealing. As I held it in my hand it drew all my heart out to it. I wanted to cuddle it, to caress it, and to hold it up against my cheek. It was a little whimsical face looking up at me, and it was smiling — the most exquisite, tender, mirthful smile. Flowers seem to me constantly to embody this quaint, fantastic, yet always tender and poetic, mirth. There is hardly a blossom that has n’t this whimsical, laughing expression. They are beautiful, of course, but we do not so often see their trick of laughter as well. I think perhaps they are tiny manifestations of God’s mirth. His littlest smiles, perhaps. It is all so tender and poetic. A mirth that could not be so mirthful if it were not so tender; a tenderness that could not be half so tender were it not so mirthful. I am sure that laughter is almost as much at the heart of the universe as beauty and love.

Cyclamen like to pretend they are cross little animals with their ears laid back; or else that they are little fugitive maidens fleeing very fast across the meadows, with their hair blown back from their lovely faces. Their whimsical trick of play-acting like this is all a part of their quaint mirth. They have of course other attributes as well — beauty, and spirituality, and love. Love I feel with flowers particularly. I seem to get hold of that exquisite sense of the whole world’s being wuapped in the essence of God’s love more often through flowers than through anything else. They are to me indescribably dear merry little companions. My affection goes out to them constantly in a deep, happy reverence. The reverence is not only for the lovely little things themselves, but also for the wonder that is back of them — an ecstasy of worship.

I think it was Suso who at one time would not permit himself to smell a rose, because he feared that to do so might induce a sensuous emotion. St. Catherine of Siena, on the other hand, at the mere sight of a rose could become immediately ‘wrapped in God.’

I am sure St. Catherine’s attitude was the right one. The flowers must have been very tenderly amused over Suso’s fear of losing his soul through them. Their mirth seems to me always tender: tender, and understanding, and comforting.

Yesterday, when I was so happy over the consciousness of God, everything seemed exquisitely beautiful, and overflowing with zest. I remember particularly a pair of carriage horses that trotted splendidly. They were beautiful horses, but that was not so much what delighted me. It was the life in them, their motion, their brisk trotting, and the gay sound of the hoof-beats. The whole thing was extraordinarily exhilarating and inspiring. It made me want to trot too. The sounds of their hoofbeats were gray and brown. Sounds nearly always have colors in my mind. Also, to a certain extent, times of happiness— when the happiness is somewhat of a spiritual nature — seem to be connected with color. On particularly happy days I have sometimes felt as if I were walking in a streak of sunlight, and all the world were going by to rhythm. I used to think this was imagination; now I believe it may be something much more real than I had supposed. It is possible, as I have seen somewhere suggested, that when our spirit is happy it does generate a kind of inner light. I have seen people very occasionally whose faces appeared to be illumined as though their souls were shining through. I also think that love is tangible. I have been conscious sometimes, when I was with people who loved each other, of a sort of warm atmosphere that they gave off and that I could feel, though the love was not directed to me.

Yesterday, late in the afternoon, I went up to the edge of the woods and sat for a time on the little bench there, and looked away across the valley to the mountains against the sky. I had, as I so often have, that sensation of something going on in nature, that I am always trying to define. While I was thinking about it, it came to me that perhaps what I felt was personality. It seemed to me as though that mountain rearing its head up there against the sky had a real personality — or rather, perhaps, a real consciousness. And the consciousness was a consciousness of love. It seemed as though the mountain were lifting itself up to the sky like a face lifted to be kissed, and that the kiss it was receiving was God’s. And perhaps this is that elusive something that I feel so often in nature. The flowers and mountains are all living in God’s love, and there is a consciousness about it all — whether the consciousness is God’s or theirs or both. I am constantly feeling this in regard to nature. I do not imagine it. On happy days I have something the same feeling about myself — a joyous happiness over being in God’s presence, and in his affection. I love myself then, and take delight in every gesture. I think this might be a faint realization of the ecstasy of creation. It is not exactly a delight in myself as myself — it is rather a delight in God’s delight in me. I am like a little child doing things for its mother’s applause.

This morning was one of my ecstatically happy times. When I went out I wanted to dance along the street instead of walk. I wanted to run and run and run, far away, where I could be all alone for a little while, just with my own self and Nature and God. I constantly have this desire to escape. To go off somewhere far away and be all by myself for a time. I remember when I was still in my teens, I went out to the porch one very bright moonlight night, when the ground was covered with snow. It was almost as bright as day. There was the moonlight, and the wide sweep of mountains, and the white snow over the ground, and the loving stillness of God over all. I was all alone, for every one else was fast indoors. Suddenly I jumped off the porch into the snow and ran and ran, away down the lawn — all alone with the snow and the moonlight and God.

Even now, in my dreams, I often seem to be running and dancing and taking all sorts of violent and fantastic exercise. All of this is amusing when one remembers my years of discretion, but one’s years of discretion are only a kind of staid mantle that Time wraps us up in. They are not real. The real thing is the youth and eternity which are wrapped up inside, and which, of course, constantly bubble through that ridiculous skim of Time and years of discretion.

As I sit and write by the window now, I see people walking up and down the street, but I want them to dance instead of walk. Even the children don’t dance enough. A moment ago a delightful little boy was playing in a vacant lot opposite. He had on a gray sweater and a little gray peaked cap, and looked like a Brownie. I had every hope that he might suddenly be snatched into a realization of the ecstasy and beauty of life that is surging all about us, and go off all at once in a mad ‘ Godintoxicated ’ dance of delight. I longed to have him do it. It would have been a little expression of my own happiness. But he did not. He was too intent over the useful possibilities of some old boards lying about.

It would not be seemly for me to dance along the street, but indeed I think the children might do it, just to let off some of the pent-up rapture of life in older people’s hearts. Lambs in the spring are a great comfort with their delightful, whimsical, exuberant skipping. My mother derives endless enjoyment from watching them. She is an old lady, but she is happy, and I imagine that the skipping of the lambs is an outlet for her eternal youth. But it is easy to see that something has gone wrong when older people have to trust to lambs and puppies and kittens to give expression to the joy of life, instead of to children.

Just after waking in the morning, if I think back a little, I can often recover layer after layer of dreams. At first I only remember the one that is with me when I wake, but by following that back and back, I find that one dream drifts into another almost endlessly. The theory that all dreams are suppressed desires is, I think, only partly true. Deep down under the desire dreams there is something else, something lovely and mysterious. Out of last night’s dreams, for instance, I recall a long series, opening more or less into one another, of perfectly uninteresting surface dreams, but beyond these my memory just brushes something that is different. I cannot really recall any of it except a delicious sense of lightness and freedom, and of running exquisitely fast; and these words only palely convey the actual sensation. I cannot express it successfully, but I have a feeling that my real self, my whole self, knows all about it, and is perhaps even now laughing down there in the hidden depths of me at the clumsy attempts of my half self to interpret this wisp of memory which I have dragged up to the light of every day.

I think perhaps it is true that, when the body is asleep, the half-consciousness which serves us here is free to slip out and rejoin the whole consciousness, the older brother-self of spirit which we all possess; but that the remembrance of this nightly reunion is wiped out by the confusing surface dreams through which we pass on our way back to waking. Perhaps if we could train ourselves to remember through this wall of dreams, we might recapture our larger self which is there just on the other side of the wall.

Here in this life we are like Jack-inthe-box. Our spirit is squeezed into something that is too small for it, with the lid hooked down tight, but every now and again, through the pressure of some high emotion, the lid flies off, we shoot up to our full height, and gaze with delighted eyes on a lovely new world. Once, through an accident, I think that the lid flew off for me. I received a violent blow on the head which knocked me insensible for a short time. When I regained consciousness, I brought back with me a feeling that I had been where the real things are, and as though this life here were hardly more than a dream. In those few moments of unconsciousness I had waked into truth. What truth is, and where I had found it, I do not know. All I brought back with me, like a trailing cloud of glory, was the conviction of having been a wanderer returned, a mirage-chaser looking at last upon reality. I had been where I belonged, and where the permanent things are to be found, and this life appeared, when I awoke, to be unreal to the point of absurdity. There was, indeed, the vague sense of a joke about the whole experience, as though the same trick — the trick of being made to believe that material life is all — had been played upon me, or I had played it upon myself, many times before. Then life in this world picked me up again and squeezed me inexorably back into my small self, like Jack being squeezed into his box. But for those lovely moments when the lid was off, I had sprung up to my full height, and never again has flesh succeeded in completely blinding me to the spirit.

That we meet this larger self at death, I am very sure; but because sometimes by accident, and sometimes in moments of spiritual exultation, we occasionally break through to it even now, I believe it is possible in this life to enter into it much more often, and much more vividly than we ever suspect. This is, I think, what Christ taught. His Kingdom of Heaven, that life more abundant, was an experience of the present — an intensification of this existence, not something of the far-away uncertain future. Our lack of understanding has pushed this bright and beautiful possibility further and further from us, until, at last, we have thrust it over the rim of death, there to await us in the next world, while all the time, did we but guess it, it is here at our very elbows. For the most part we go at halfpressure through a pale world, but sometimes some poignant love, joy, beauty, or suffering, lifts up the everlasting gates of our blindness, and the King of Glory comes in. He has come many times of late upon the battlefields of Europe. He will never come in a timid, artificial, selfish, and ease-loving existence. It is when ease and safety are torn away, and we are stripped to the very bare bones, stripped to the very soul, that the soul emerges triumphant. Better still, it is when we voluntarily strip ourselves of the little selfish timidities for a great cause, that this mysterious King of Glory comes in most radiantly. The saints and mystics knew this. They were not in pursuit of a pale negation; they were furiously and gloriously crucifying the smaller self, that the larger might be set free. They knew that they would never find what they were seeking in a hideous, exotic pursuit of happiness and comfort, or in frightened attempts to escape suffering. It is to be found in love, that splendid and reckless outpouring of self for someone or something other than ourselves. In beauty, when it stabs us awake to the marvels all about us, and when the awakening brings with it a certain wildness and intoxication, a madness of joy, before which all the small hot-house artificialities are swept away; in truth, that deep simplicity which thrusts one down into the still fastnesses of the spirit where God is to be met; and finally, it is found in that courage which knows it is infinitely better to die at full breath of vivid unselfishness, rather than live on in a dreary ease and safety.

The conquerors of the world, the saviors of mankind, are those who have succeeded in living that life here on earth. They have broken down the barriers between the two worlds. They have stooped down to matter, and filling it with spirit, have lifted it up triumphantly, so that men have gazed with astonished eyes upon a glorious new type of life. It may be, when spirit has conquered matter, and works through it successfully, that a higher existence is presented than that of pure spirit. This may be the type toward which mankind is moving. It may be that even now we are on the threshold of a more universal participation in that life, a fuller incarnation of the spirit. Perhaps a new birth is at hand. What is all this restlessness and worldweariness, this extravagance of living, — mad art, mad dancing, mad emotions, — save the fever and abnormality of pregnancy? Many believe that the birth has already taken place, and that the child of this madness is war and destruction. But the war may be only a part of the whole travail — the wildest, the worst, and possibly the last of the birth-pangs. In the lull of peace which must follow, the world will have time to think. The great cataclysm has violently awakened whole nations, has wrenched them out of their accustomed ways, has torn material things to shreds. It is in the pauses after such awakenings, when the heart is still open, that the spirit rushes in most tumultuously. It is then that souls go forward a step, are swept up to higher levels. Is it too much to hope that the whole of mankind is to advance to these higher levels ? That more and more frequently individuals are to break down the hard barriers and drive through to that increased vitality which is the hidden possibility of us all, and which already many of us have experienced in fleeting moments? With this larger life there must come an evergrowing realization of worlds beyond our present one — worlds which are ours to inherit some day, as the blue sky is the heritage of the unsuspecting caterpillar. With this fuller realization, it is possible that the world-old enemy of mankind, the fear of death, is to be vanquished. The time may not be far off when to lose a friend by death will be hardly more than to have him cross the ocean; when our own passing will be merely the happy setting sail for a new country. It may be that in the great war, which has furnished an orgy such as the world has never before seen, death as we have known it in all its agony of parting and uncertainty, has at last been glutted to the full, has reached its climax, and must hereafter diminish.

O people of the world, all things have died! It may be that now at last death itself is dying!