“The great secret of what, whence and whither shall yet be known. The dream of man’s perfection shall come true. You and I have read a few pages in the sealed book. For us the last enemy has been destroyed, the dark river bridged. We know there is no separation; that the dead are neither dead nor gone. This is the great secret of the universe.
“I think I understand what it means to see God. The more we see of Him, or It—the great principle of intelligence and love—in the atom, the insect, the human being or the angel, the nobler and sweeter will be our lives. All possible forms and modes of existence are expressions of himself. As Whitman says, ‘A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.’
“My lifelong dream of finding my own people shall be realized.
“My people, my own people—they who aspired, struggled and suffered—who came to their own, and whom their own so often refused to receive. They who first announced the truth in all ages, and were stoned and crucified. They who brought their divine gifts of poesy and prophecy, of art and science, of light in its thousand forms and laid them on the world’s ungrateful altar. My dear people, I see you in the far dim aisles of the past, and I see you toiling up the shining heights of the future, and know you for my own, my spiritual kindred, with whom I dwelt in pleasant and also difficult places ‘huge times ago,’ and with whom I shall yet mount and mount great steeps now unseen.
“Are not all, all our own people, each a manifestation of the great soul or self that is imaged in all other selves? But they who know how to love are more truly our own. They are farther on their upward journey. ‘For as many as are led by the spirit of love, these are the sons of God.’
“All philosophies, all religions, all literature that fail to lead us back to love, our central source—love, the essence and substance of life, the energy of the world, the potential, moving force of all that is or ever shall be, are vain and foolish.
“Only to love one another. This is the whole law. This is what we are always longing and hunting for, though we give it many names and see it through many veils and in many shapes. But it is love, only love, the greatest and simplest thing in the world.
“Once I read a story of an Oriental magician who performed miraculous cures. When one whom he had healed asked his name that he might mention it in his prayers, he answered: ‘I have many names, but they all mean the same—Love.’
“Love is all there is. Everything else is only an appearance or phantom. My search for my own people was but the search for love, yet how many mirages I saw, into how many pits I stumbled before I came in sight of its temple!
“But the love that opens the kingdom of Heaven, like the love of God, is ‘broader than the measure of man’s mind.’ It is the love of God—for it is the love of all that is. We know not love until we see ourselves one with the whole, without division and without difference, until we see every man as our brother and every woman as our sister and every child as our own, or better, as ourselves.