The "dwellers at the threshold" are the individualized entities of the
elements of nature. Air, fire, earth depths, and seas. These belong
to the domain of nature, pure and simple, and are met and controlled by
the affinities of the chemicals of the material, physical organization
of the individual. The most potent of these leading in the degree of
material success to be achieved in dealing with material life.
Money getting in the mines, earth depths. All manufactories that
require raging and continuous flame; ships to sail, and conquer water
spirits; electrical and etherial forces that move in the air currents.
These are the soulless, irresponsible "goblins" and "gnomes," "Fire
spirits" and "_ignes fatui_" of the nether world. All human beings who
progress at all have to deal with one or more of these forces.
Beginning in blind ignorance, through struggle, the mortal will is
developed and the mere animal man has set his foot upon a low rung of
the ladder of the ascending series. Next, man has to deal with the
primal races. The "Missing link" which will never be found save at the
"threshold" where it combines its forces with those of man's other
natural enemies, and keeps jealous watch and ward at every point of
egress of the soul which seeks to enlarge its domain. Finally the will
of man, with its long heredity of war with these potentialities, "at
enmity with God," resisting the divine; even as these have striven to
hold him in a perpetual slavery, is in its last struggle. The vast
aggregation of human will, set free from the clog of the flesh, knowing
nothing of the divine, seeing no guiding light, combines its forces,
and commingles its powers with whatever its endless tentacles can
reach. These are the powers and principalities of the air. These are
the demons, "bad spirits," "devils" and "familiars" of the literature
of the ages, and the presiding geniuses of many a phenomenon resulting
from modern research into the mysteries of nature. As their
intelligence exceeds that of the underlying grades, so just in that
degree is their power increased, and used, to block the gateway that
opens upon the path. Their abodes lie in outer darkness, or are
illumined only by flashes of fictitious, and evanescent light from the
expiring embers of earthly exhalations, and the phosphorescent gleams
of decaying forms. The soul that has received an illumination from the
Divine has in its keeping a talisman of power, yet none can escape
these watchful ones.
"Here eyes do regard you in eternity's stillness." "Choose well; your
choice is brief, but yet endless." The winged fiend, the "Appolyon,"
must be met and settled with at every turn of the way that leads to the
kingdom which the Christ came to establish, and whose best name is
"peace." In this grade, love finds no home, but its great prototype,
the lust of the flesh, stealing ever the livery of heaven, lures on
tender souls to their sad undoing.
By help of divine love alone can the soul journey safely onward and
upward through this great concentrated, immediately-environing earth
grade. It is solidly compact, sleepless and untiring, seeking
ceaselessly whom it may win to its realm. It is the unrecognized
longing of the soul for restoration to its divine heritage of love.