There is no end to the myths and fables that have been put before the superstitious and ignorant, and each and every one has its price; and every celebration draws its pay; and all for the glory of God, not at all for the help of man. The peasants and other laborers starve, and are overwhelmed by the riot of fatal disease.
As a money-making concern, it leaves nothing to be wished for—it is a great success.
There was no "beginning," there can be no "ending." Whatever appears ended in our experience is only in seeming, and in other shapes and in transformed relationships will appear again and again, asserting "There is no death, what seems so is transition," change of elements and forces. There is but one law; one creative centre. One model for advanced individualized life in any world; in all worlds. The whole purpose and intent of all creation is simply to render all inert, unused matter into life. The universal Spirit pervades all things. Mineral; vegetable; animal; human; angel; one unbroken chain, from the sod up to divine perfection, from the pigmy races we see here, on this small globe, up, forever upward and onward to the courts of the "sons of God"; to the spheres of the eternally immortal. Ignorant mortals assert from time to time, the day and the hour of the "End of the World," and foolishly prepare for the final destruction of this planet. It is true, this earth is always coming to an end, and always rehabilitating itself with its own unused materials. Mountains slide down and fill up the valleys. The waters of the sea undermine and gnaw off big slices from the land; all, all is motion, vibration; nothing stands still. If it were possible for anything in the universe to stop, to break the everlasting chain, there would be no universe; there would be only chaos come again, and all the work of setting the planets a-spinning round and round their centres and apportioning the orbits of the stately suns, and their places in the precessions of their accompanying worlds; all would go for nothing, all would have to be begun again, and on the same lines exactly. There are no other; there is no other law, and the name of the law that holds all in imperishable harmony, is Love, just Love.
LIFE IN NATURE.
The microscope has revealed to us the life and habits of myriads of creatures of whose existence we had previously no knowledge. We had not even a suspicion that what to our unaided vision appeared inert elements held a rampant, multitudinous life, nowhere dead, but always surging and changing, ever replacing death and decay with a new life all its own. Nature's luxuriance everywhere fills us with wonder and delight. The fragrant ferny depths of the forest, and the lush growth of the rank marsh-land, the immeasurable sands of the ocean-edge hiding in their mysterious sameness innumerable and beautiful shells and corals, and the mountain top heaped up with boulders, or crumbling by nature's processes into pebbly imponderance.
Life, swarming everywhere. Tiny leaflets giving succor and shelter to tinier animal life—its special fairy. Huge beasts couchant in majestic trees, guarding against invasions, with a fierce, jealous rage inherited from the gnomes and satyrs.
Deep sea depths untouched by lightnings, where the kraken makes his home; jolly dolphins disporting in the sunlight, responding to the cry of the hovering wild duck and gull. Human beings overcrowding in the oldest settled portions of the globe, until nature's resources for their sustenance are wellnigh exhausted.
All these, and many more, might justly be enumerated to illustrate the bountiful and inexhaustible resources of the great creative, reconstructive Power in the universe of matter.
Life, everywhere life, forcing out death and decay. Ever changing its form of expression. Reforming itself upon steadily advancing models. All nature swinging in circles so wide and vast as to require centuries for their completion.
One of the most fascinating doctrines of the Swedish Seer is contained in the "law of correspondences." By it many things, seemingly irregular, "fall into line," and become parts of a great process of development. Following this method, the earnest, searching mind, looking through nature up to "Nature's God," seeks to go beyond the confines of the mere animal, material existence, and come into sympathy with and get a knowledge of the world unseen, but often felt and recognized, spiritual life, filling all the spaces which seem to the earth-dimmed senses dull and void. There is no death, no vacancy in this realm of nature, any more than in that other, more tangible one, the outgrowth and the necessity of this great storm-tossed planet. But all the expressions of life in this sphere are different from those to which our material senses are accustomed, and require the action of another, a finer, more spiritual set of faculties in order to comprehend them even partially which, at the best, is all we can hope to do while we remain denizens of and subject to the laws which control this world of material substance.