“Never. There is always the cloud of witnesses of which Paul spoke.”
A stranger came sometimes whose character was of an antique mould. He gave no name, but others, when questioned about him, said he had been one of the great of earth, and also one of the good—none greater since Jesus.
“What is the soul of man?” Cartice asked him.
“Can any one comprehend God?” was his reply.
“I do not understand,” she persisted.
“Eternal being mirrors itself in every existence—is every existence. When you know that indefinable, illimitable, deathless and divine manifestation called the soul, you will know God, for in the one is imaged or reflected the other. Remember, eternal being is the background of every existence.”
Looking at these words fresh from an intelligence whose habitation earthly eye hath not seen, Cartice Doring thrilled with a strange joy, in sympathetic vibration with the wave of truth that touched her spirit. For one hallowed moment the great gates opened and she saw a light more beautiful than the light of the morning, more glorious than the light of many suns, softer, brighter, more beatific than was ever on sea or land, for lo! she saw the reflection of the soul itself, and understood its infinite source and deathless destiny. In that ineffable moment she knew that it never had birth and never should know death, and that separateness was not of it, nor was it divisible from aught there is, and difference there was none. On the bosom of eternal being it rested secure through a thousand illusions.
The key that unlocked all mysteries was revealed by a flash of the soul’s own light. Pale and trembling she bent her head till it lay on the written words of the nameless stranger, and closed her eyes that she and the great white light might be alone together.
Thousands of years ago an Indian sage, when parting from his wife, said: “We do not love the husband in the husband, nor the wife in the wife, nor the children in the children. What we love in them, what we truly love in everything is the divine spirit, (the eternal atman, the immortal and absolute self)”—and as we should add, says Max Müller, the immortal God, for the immortal self and the immortal God must be one.