CHAPTER X
THE PATHWAY OF LOVE
Love is the Great Reality.
Everything else in this world of Experience is either tributary to love or it is an unsatisfying substitute for love; or a counterfeit of love. Love is the one cohesive, unifying, constructive force, and it is at the same time the only liberating force.
Hatred, as exemplified in warfare, may sometimes appear to free a people from the rule of a tyrant, but unless love be at the root of the "casus belli," other and more direful disasters will follow in the wake of seeming victory.
There is an erroneous idea, quite general among Christian people, that Death frees the spirit from the bonds that hold it to the mortal and the incomplete. Death only drops off the garment of the flesh; there are innumeral sheathings yet to be shed, before the soul grows the wings with which to soar to the celestial realms, where Love reigns supreme.
Love is the only power on earth or in the spheres, that can liberate us either from our own prejudices and hatreds and fears; or from the limitations and attractions of the animal-man.
Love is, indeed, the Alpha and Omega of Life. "There is no other God but Thee," has been the cry of every race on this globe, apostrophizing the unrecognized little baby-God, personified and presented to the race-mind as Horus; or as Krishna, or as Christ; but always it is Love, the Invisible, the Beautiful One, who is adored.
Ingersoll with his wonderful gift of word-painting, and inspired by that great love of humanity which characterized him, has said: