Other glimpses and echoes from the Great Beyond bring to me the answer to a problem, a few notes and a new melody, a new energy of hope and love, an inspiration from the Great Brotherhood, whose lowliest disciple I am, whose work to establish the Brotherhood, the true affinity of humanity upon earth I hold most dear, most high.
In the present dark hour all the world is drinking of one chalice, its wine the life outpoured for others. All humanity is partaking of one bread, a body which has most truly and literally being given to be broken. Death has left many songs unsung, a myriad graves are filled, youth is blighted in the bud, in this white winter men call death, and its cup is pressed close to the lips of love. Many are the hopes that lie folded away in the quiet cemetery of the heart, where we lay flowers of tender reminiscence. Yet, this sacrament of fellowship which is eclipsed in the awful impoverishment of human life will one day be swelled by the return of the young, fallen on the Field of Honor, glorified and purified for their God-appointed work in evolution.
Perhaps I have gone a few steps farther than most people into the mysterious beyond, come nearer reading the great riddle, for the creature who is not afraid of thought and worldly condemnation, who is not afraid of solitude or ridicule, will soon come near the truth, will quickly catch the incommunicable thrill of advancing destinies. She will cease to live under the despotism of days, the tyranny of years. She will know that the swiftest touch cannot put a finger on the present, and that there is but one recorder of time, the great star clock of the sky.
The symbol of life is the Circle, not the Straight line, and each of us lives over again the story of humanity, as in the shadow of pre-natal gloom we repeat the physical evolution of the race. The increase of knowledge but widens the horizon of the unknown promised land, to which we are moving onward and upward throughout the ages.
However far the mind travels there is always deep down in the soul stores of information awaiting transference to the surface of consciousness. Rich mines of knowledge are there awaiting the day when they will be uncovered, waiting in patience the day when some Divine Adventurer will search for them and bring them to light.
However great its aspirations the soul but looks out upon an illimitable horizon, and sees the human pilgrimage as a long Emmæus walk, with hearts burning by the way. Always must there be mystery in life, because life is spiritual, not material. The presence of mystery in life is the presence of God, and the infinity of God shows that mystery must always exist.
Such glimpses beyond the veil are all transfiguring. They exalt the heart in a single flash to a glow point, and show the soul of the Universe in the incandescent crucible of the eternal. In a deeply beshadowed time such visions tell us all that we need know, and it is this: God is with us and in us. Though obscure for the moment His transcendence stands outside the change and flux of time, and His awful sovereignty sways irresistibly the tides of human circumstances.
Hours must come when the pen falls from the nerveless fingers, the task is left undone, when the weary cry goes up, "There is nothing we can do!" We have been doing for so many thousand years, the years which the locusts hath eaten. What have we achieved?
When such hours come, as come they must, is there nothing to fall back upon but this awful confession of failure, this haunting undertone of all our mortal life that many ages have not hushed?
Surely, yes! There is always for the mystic the unmeasured immensity of soul land to explore, that Great Beyond and within which is infinite, eternal, and of which we are all a part.