New knowledge had brought new responsibility. Life was not to be haggled through as a hateful bargain; it must be lived in the highest sense; its lessons faithfully learned and character constructed by the master architect, experience. One must do one’s best, in the teeth of the storm, in the front of the battle. We must always be able to look our souls in the face without shame.
Suppose her efforts and even her life ended in failure at last! What matter? To succeed in the world’s opinion is often to fail in the exacting eye of conscience. Perhaps the only permanent success is failure. The joy, the glory and the reward are in the doing, not in the result. The fateful question for all of us will be, not, “Hast thou won?” but “Hast thou striven?”
The things we call pain and pleasure she knew to be illusions, mere thought pictures painted on the canvas of our consciousness, by ignorance—ignorance of our true being and the true purpose of existence.
So she said, “No matter what comes, since I know that out of all the pain and humiliation the world can put upon me, out of the shadow of death, I shall rise and pass on to my eternal unfolding.
“For me there is no want. Have I not bread to eat that thousands of others as yet have not, because they will not receive it?
“For me and for the whole human race there is but one thing needful, and that is the knowledge that eternal being is within, around, about us and we are it.”
Spiritualism? The ignorant will say with a sneer. Yes, in the highest, broadest and deepest sense. It sustained this lonely woman on her journey to a great city to work out her life’s problem, and after she was there it gave her patience and confidence. It made it impossible for her to seek the river, and enabled her to wear a cheerful face and carry a hopeful heart, while her little store of money dribbled down to a few lonesome dollars.
Without this rock of faith those long, lonely days of seeking and waiting would have been unbearable. Sometimes she sat in the public squares looking compassionately upon the pitiful people about her. The homeless, the hopeless, the hungry, the despairing, the weary, the ailing, the suffering, the broken-hearted were there, some in rags and some in fine garments. Within each one ached and ate the canker of a wretchedness they tried to hide from happier souls who passed them by.
Cartice read their misery by the light of past suffering, and yearned to say to them: “Awake! You are in a dark dream. The conditions that trouble you are unreal—mere illusions, and touch not your true life at all. You are gods every one, but unaware of your divinity. One day the dream shall pass and you shall know this.”
But the etiquette of civilization forbade it. We see our fellow beings suffer and perish from some wound in the soul, yet approach them not. All she could do was to send out to them, through the silent waves of thought, messages of hope and good cheer.