Such dawns beckon imperiously to the pilgrim, to leave the shelter of the roof-tree, and come forth to walk with the immortals whilst the Morning Star, the light-bringer, still shines, a white gold radiance in the heavens, and the distance is still dissolved in veils of pearl and opal.
Such daybreaks always rouse in me the urge for wider thought, for the broad day of the mind. Out of the limitless beyond comes the certain knowledge of a something unimagined, lying just outside human thought. I am sure there is so much not yet imagined, something more than mere existence.
There is a wine of happiness in tranquil daybreak, and an aloofness from life that urges one to seek for that which is beyond comprehension. The draught exalts the soul, and quickens it with unquenchable fire, until the world falls away, far from one, as day wells out of still darkness. Only at such moments do we reach the true horizon.
Again, there is an amnesty in such dawns, a glory of release from the house of bondage. In the great silences, life, as we know it, is remote, and the immensity is a magic that draws the soul, fusing it in a strange passion, so that whatever fulfillment our existence holds is summed in that hour of solitude.
A pale wash of translucent gold is thrown across land and sea. On the far horizon a ship is set in relief, against a core of crimson flame which heralds the sun. A dove coos softly, and on a bare branch a thrush thrills in waves of sound, seeking in the universal ether to reproduce its divine instinct in other feathered hearts that are attuned to its melody.
Such joys as these are transitory, and never wholly possessed. They pass the enclosures of life, and bring one nearer to the beating heart of truth. The agonizing fear of losing hold on them is, in itself, the cause of their dispersal. It is the same at rare moments of semi-consciousness, when one has actually laid hold of a genuine astral experience—and knows it. Then comes the frantic endeavor to hold on—to pin the moment fast and tight, till the whole vision is absorbed. The soul seems to hold its breath! How often, with bitter disappointment I have rushed reluctantly into full waking consciousness—and only half the story told. Fragmentary though such moments are their potency is such that they endure through time. Thank God, that whilst the wedlock of body and soul still holds undissolved there is scope for such joys. They are uncommunicable, and may not be shared with others at will, and they tell the soul that she is not of creation and cannot be contained by law. At such hours she learns the truth, that she passes for a brief span into the limited, from out the limitless whence she came. At such sacramental hours one can pray the prayer of Socrates, offered up by the banks of the Illissus:
"O Beloved God of the forests and flocks and all ye Divinities of this place, grant me to become beautiful in the inner man, and that whatever outward things I have may be at peace with those within. May I deem the wise man rich, and may I have so much wealth, and so much only, as a good man can manage to enjoy.
"Do we need anything else, Phædrus? For myself I have prayed enough."
How many people now recall fragments of former lives! Ask the next man you meet if he has any recollections of former existences, and be sure he will not eye you askance as a fugitive from Bedlam. He may smile and shake his head, and regret to say he isn't psychic, but he won't ask you what on earth you mean. This is how we have progressed towards truth in the last thirty years. The truth of reincarnation is being quietly accepted by the West and is now openly preached from many pulpits. If God is love, who could reconcile with any comprehensive idea of justice and law in the world the lives and experiences of common humanity? How reconcile the births taking place in one single day in their vast diversity, by the hell for the criminal, born, nurtured and killed in crime, who never had a chance, and Heaven for the happily born, who need never have a temptation? What is the Divine Law lying behind this seeming hideous injustice? Undoubtedly the continuous evolution of the soul in bodies of matter. Men are looking now to the scheme of organic evolution to provide the field for spiritual evolution. They are finding it in the depths of their own consciousness.