ADIEU
To-day there are many, an ever-swelling number, who behold with joy the
gates ajar, who standing in the twilight catch momentary glimpses of
dawn upon the horizon of time, who know by personal experience that they
have come into touch with a region where vast schemes are conceived, and
universal laws of boundless magnitude connected with the soul's eternal
pilgrimage are carried out.
Again, there are others, timid, shrinking souls to whom, by a mere
chance combination of circumstances, a glimpse has been shown which is
none too welcome. Such affrighted ones drop the eyelids from the
startling vision. They will have none of it, and they are free to accept
or reject, go on, or stand still.
Others, again, have actually been born with that super-normal sight
which can discern the workings behind the drop scene shrouding the
stupendous drama of cosmic government.
I have long been conscious that the veil has worn very thin between
myself and another world lying around me. As the years draw swiftly on,
and every second thrown back into eternity brings me nearer to blessed
deliverance I find the rents in the veil grow more numerous. They bring
single shining moments, which reveal the spirit of life, its motives and
consecration.
Through the driving storm wrack there will come quite suddenly a
brilliant heavenly glimpse. It never lasts long, but long enough to show
me reality. Something of the vastness of cosmos and the pathetic
minuteness of this earth, just a speck of star dust in the palm of God,
an atom of world stuff swinging in boundless space.
Something of the reality of those shining ones who guide the progression
of natural order, embodiments of resistless energy and of stateliest
imperial mien.
Glimpses that show to me what was in the mind of the great Christian
Mystic when he wrote of a mighty angel: "A rainbow was upon his head,
and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire."
Behind such visions extend vast ranges of being, quite outside my ken,
yet, nevertheless, speaking to me of things, for the expression of which
no words have yet been coined. Infinitely greater than anything that can
be said. Significant in meaning beyond expression, and far transcending
imagination.
Such glimpses show to me lives that as compared with ours, are as ours
to the tiniest insect afloat for an hour on the breath of the south
wind. Lives which ordain the fateful hour when the rise and fall of
empires, the destruction of nations, and the clash of worlds, and their
cosmic significance in world history shall begin or end. Where things
life promised but never gave come to full fruition.
Other glimpses and echoes from the Great Beyond bring to me the answer
to a problem, a few notes and a new melody, a new energy of hope and
love, an inspiration from the Great Brotherhood, whose lowliest
disciple I am, whose work to establish the Brotherhood, the true
affinity of humanity upon earth I hold most dear, most high.
In the present dark hour all the world is drinking of one chalice, its
wine the life outpoured for others. All humanity is partaking of one
bread, a body which has most truly and literally being given to be
broken. Death has left many songs unsung, a myriad graves are filled,
youth is blighted in the bud, in this white winter men call death, and
its cup is pressed close to the lips of love. Many are the hopes that
lie folded away in the quiet cemetery of the heart, where we lay flowers
of tender reminiscence. Yet, this sacrament of fellowship which is
eclipsed in the awful impoverishment of human life will one day be
swelled by the return of the young, fallen on the Field of Honor,
glorified and purified for their God-appointed work in evolution.
Perhaps I have gone a few steps farther than most people into the
mysterious beyond, come nearer reading the great riddle, for the
creature who is not afraid of thought and worldly condemnation, who is
not afraid of solitude or ridicule, will soon come near the truth, will
quickly catch the incommunicable thrill of advancing destinies. She will
cease to live under the despotism of days, the tyranny of years. She
will know that the swiftest touch cannot put a finger on the present,
and that there is but one recorder of time, the great star clock of the
sky.
The symbol of life is the Circle, not the Straight line, and each of us
lives over again the story of humanity, as in the shadow of pre-natal
gloom we repeat the physical evolution of the race. The increase of
knowledge but widens the horizon of the unknown promised land, to which
we are moving onward and upward throughout the ages.
However far the mind travels there is always deep down in the soul
stores of information awaiting transference to the surface of
consciousness. Rich mines of knowledge are there awaiting the day when
they will be uncovered, waiting in patience the day when some Divine
Adventurer will search for them and bring them to light.
However great its aspirations the soul but looks out upon an illimitable
horizon, and sees the human pilgrimage as a long Emmaeus walk, with
hearts burning by the way. Always must there be mystery in life, because
life is spiritual, not material. The presence of mystery in life is the
presence of God, and the infinity of God shows that mystery must always
exist.
Such glimpses beyond the veil are all transfiguring. They exalt the
heart in a single flash to a glow point, and show the soul of the
Universe in the incandescent crucible of the eternal. In a deeply
beshadowed time such visions tell us all that we need know, and it is
this: God is with us and in us. Though obscure for the moment His
transcendence stands outside the change and flux of time, and His awful
sovereignty sways irresistibly the tides of human circumstances.
Hours must come when the pen falls from the nerveless fingers, the task
is left undone, when the weary cry goes up, "There is nothing we can
do!" We have been doing for so many thousand years, the years which the
locusts hath eaten. What have we achieved?
When such hours come, as come they must, is there nothing to fall back
upon but this awful confession of failure, this haunting undertone of
all our mortal life that many ages have not hushed?
Surely, yes! There is always for the mystic the unmeasured immensity of
soul land to explore, that Great Beyond and within which is infinite,
eternal, and of which we are all a part.
Ah! but it may be said, all are not mystics, to which I would reply, all
who desire can be mystics. For what, after all, is a mystic, but one who
enters into possession of the inner life? One who becomes fully aware of
her self-consciousness, and who gains thereby new faculties and
enlightenment. It places her in touch with that supreme reality which
some call God and some The Great Creative Power. The mystic knows that
power is to be found within through identification and submergence with
the Primordial Force which constitutes the ocean of life. She can always
pass the sky and clouds of earth, and enter the great, deep, real world
outside. It is always possible to her to seek a fairer world where the
only things that matter are the eternal verities, which should be taken
kneeling, like a sacrament.
Love and life which is Beauty.
Love and power which is Goodness.
Love and knowledge which is Wisdom.
The Road of the Flaming Sacred Heart is strewn with insight, kindness
and sympathy, which gives eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, and a
voice to the dumb! It is paved with love that serves the humble and
defends the disinherited. Bravely it walks the _Via Dolorosa_, and it
"Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, its reward
to know the love of God, unutterable even to them that know."
The Mystic can face the future without fear, for the power has been
given her to take her soul, and like a carrier dove, loose it into
space, to speed away into the fathomless, the everlasting, the voiceless
deep whose silence is the "Welcome Home" of God.