“The Knight of the Pale Horse, he laid
His shadowy lance against the spell,
That hid her Self: As if afraid,
The cruel blackness shrank and fell.
Then, lifting slow her pleasant sleep,
He took her with him through the night,
And swam a river cold and deep
And vanished up an awful height.”
—S. M. B. Piatt.
Some time, it may be, before the world is very much older, we shall know well what now we but dimly discern, that thought is the substance and will the operating force of the universe, and that both are electric.
Then shall we understand the irresistible powers of attraction which thought has for kindred thought; and we shall know why we seek eternally our own kind of people, consciously or unconsciously, and never know rest for the spirit until we find them, for only with them is to be had the life-giving, soul-sustaining quality of sympathy, through whose vibrations the universe was formed and is maintained.
In obedience to this law of attraction Cartice Doring continued to search for persons awake to the joyful fact that there is no death, so she might learn more of the laws which govern communion between life here and beyond. She found believers, but because of the various fads and diversified foolishness with which they frequently garnished their belief they were of slight help to her.
Each gave his faith a name that revealed the fence he had built around his mind, though he condemned all other fences. Some preached against the phenomena of the spiritual philosophy and secretly reveled in it.
And there were the theosophists, who, as Mr. Stead says, can always explain everything. From the proud eminence of their omniscience many of them looked down on plain spiritualists, and advised against showing any civility to spirits. Yet they patronized mediums and astrologers on the sly, and frequently produced a little of the phenomena themselves, merely to show their occult power.
Among these and sometimes outside the sacred pale, were reincarnationists who make the plausible and beautiful theory of progression through an eternity of existences distasteful and tiresome by their “memories” of past human experiences. They had been princes of high degree, invariably, never paupers or criminals. Napoleons, Cæsars, Mahomets, Cleopatras and Sapphos were wearisomely plentiful; but humbler types were rare. Many were so busy feeding their vanity with these romantic hallucinations they had no time to learn anything useful.
Hypnotists were numerous, many of them claiming that their particular science accounted for everything under the sun.
Then there were many who declared that in all the universe there is but good; but they fell into factions represented by different leaders, and fought many and many a bitter bout to prove it.
It was enough to make one cry out in anguish, “Where can wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?”