No one can avoid companionship. But objective personalities supply but a small part of the innate craving for intimate good cheer and friendliness. Whether or not consciously chosen, the ego must have a supremely close communion with its own thought-forms,—its veritable creations. As a duplicate selfhood it is firmly linked to them. If man must carry this secondary man with him, what sort of a character shall he be? His fellow-men, with whom he daily mingles, though seemingly near, are infinitely distant when compared with his own self-made mental environment,—his real world.
Every man is like an artist who is sentenced to dwell with his own pictures, so hung that they continually stare him in the face. But especially when from choice [pg 301]or necessity one for a season turns aside from his accustomed Objective, he finds intimate relationship with his subjective structures of the past. He is forced to a careful inspection of his own stored-up images, and it is woeful if they frown upon him. All the hates, envies, and antagonisms that he has ever projected are turned in upon himself. They surround and threaten him, and their growls are disquieting. He thought they had been sent away, but their accumulated recoil was only postponed.
On the other hand, all the loves, harmonies, and hopes that have been sent out, now possibly forgotten, rise up out of the misty deep and send back a smile, and return affection with added interest. They are lived over again.
“Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory.”
Heavens and hells are stored up in the chambers of the soul, and if perchance diversion for a time may seem to bury them, their resurrection and visitation surely follow in due course.
But as Saulus looked in upon himself, he found that he could increasingly choose and control those things that should mentally dwell with him. With all his cruel impetuosity of the past, his life had not been devoid of good thoughts and deeds, and these he struggled to keep in review. But vastly greater than all else, when the dark Past marshalled itself before him, he turned to the Present God. How unlike was the God he found in Horeb to the tribal Deity he had served in the Holy City! The difference was in his own vision.
Often he would sit for hours with eyes closed and body relaxed, in silent communion with the felt Presence. At such times he realized a positive influx of sweetness and strength from the Universal, which thrilled him in mind and body.
The crust of his former hardness was breaking up, and his soul was growing childlike and plastic. The rigid dogmatism and intolerance in him, which for so long had been impenetrable to the Spirit of Truth, were dissolving, and love and wisdom were opened up, as water from a fountain whose seal had been newly unloosed.
Saulus marvelled as much at the seeming change in his God as in the transformation in himself. That Deity who had rejoiced in persecution, and been angry and jealous, was now the Author of love, peace, and concord. It was clear that his former concept of God had been but a telescopic likeness of himself.