“Made to see, yet unseeing; making mystery out of that which was born with you; seeking—yet seeking afar for that which lies close at hand!
“You want peace. You go in quest of a Breast mightier than all life to rest thy tired head upon. And thy quest is like the drifting of a ship without a rudder at sea. For you think that the world is young because thou livest in it now—and it is old, so old that thousands and tens of thousands of peoples lived and died before Christ was born. You think that civilization has come to pass, and ‘civilization’ has died a thousand times under the dust of the ages. You believe you are treading the only path to God—yet have a million billion people died before you, unknowing the religions which you now know.
“O you mortals of to-day, you are small and near-sighted, and hard of hearing—even more than they who lived a million years before you, when the world was an hour or two younger than now!
“What are you? Proud of thy purse, vain of thy power, conceited in thy self-glorification—yet you seek a simple thing and cannot find it. You cannot find rest. You cannot find faith. You cannot find understanding. You cannot find that Breast mightier than all life upon which to rest thy head when the end comes and when you go to join those trillions who have gone before you.
“And, in your despair, you cry out that you know not which way to turn, that you seek in darkness, that the world is a wilderness of schisms and religions, and that you cannot tell which is the right and which is the wrong. For you know that worlds have lived and died through the eons of centuries before Christianity was born. And you are oppressed by doubt even as you grope!
“Yet you know deep in thy soul that the heavens were not an accident. You know that hundreds and thousands of worlds greater than thine own have traveled their paths in space for eternities. You know that the sun was set in the skies so long ago that all the people of the earth could not count the years of its life. And you know that a Great Hand placed it there. And that Hand, you say, was God.
“Yet you seek—and you seek—and you seek—and doubt everlastingly clouds thine eyes; and when darkness comes and you stand at the edge of the Great Beyond, you look back, and—lo!—the path you have traveled seems very short, and it is cluttered with brambles and thorns and the wreckage of shattered hopes and wasted years.
“And then you see the Light!
“And, as thy spirit departs, the mystery unveils—the answer comes.
“For that which you sought, you looked too far. Close under thy feet and close over thy head might you have found it!”