If one asks whether the orbs in space take precedence of personal will and intelligence, or personal will and intelligence take precedence of the orbs in space, one has only to ask whether builders or buildings have priority. Do pictures originate the artist? do books originate the author? If one begins to study with a belief in spirit as power and cause, one can account for all things, but to start with matter as a foundation is to fail absolutely to account for either matter or spirit.
In some infinite womb the vital Heavens, the visible Universe must have existed before time was. We see all elements have their affinities, all stars their course, all atoms their polarity. We see the wheel of Ezekiel symbolizing the whole scheme and fabric of Nature.
Heaven works not only with stupendous immensities but with small minorities. Atoms of unutterable minuteness are streaming into the unseen atmosphere every second from the souls and bodies of the human race. When the soul seeks, aspires after God, the most vital of all atoms go forth with the breath, as light from the sun to the earth. Surely we and our angel kindred inhabit one house of which the most distant provinces are in touch with the center of all. Heaven and earth are bridged by the spirit ladder of love, and the soul can inbreathe the spirit of God as the body inbreathes oxygen.
The contemplative mind beholds every day the passage of things invisible into sight, the transfer of the seen into the unseen, and all is natural. The life throb of the palpable world is a pulsation going forth every instant from the eternal energy, drawing out by an ethereal medium from the invisible and intangible, that which is visible and tangible.
I will speak now of the passage of a thing invisible into sight. How, to me, it became so I cannot tell. I don't know.
One summer evening my husband and I were occupying two communicating bedrooms in a London hotel, contiguous with one of the great railway stations. We had to make an early start in the morning, and had come there to be near our train.
I awakened in the early morning hours. The gray dawn was just beginning to show through the bars of the Venetian blinds lowered before the two windows. Those bars had not been adjusted, and they also admitted a rather bright light from a street lamp. I judged it to be somewhere about four o'clock, but I did not look at my watch. I was too pre-occupied in looking at something else.
My bare arm was stretched outside the coverlet, and I was aware that what had awakened me was a cold wind blowing on my skin. The furniture of the room was dimly outlined, and at first I vaguely threw my half-open eyes around without perceiving anything unusual, but gradually my senses, shaking off their drowsiness, became aware of movement between the bed and the window. Something tall and gray was wavering like a pillar of smoke betwixt me and the struggling daylight. I closed my eyes again with a creepy feeling, a disinclination to look again, but my bare arm, which still lay outside the coverlet, received another intimation that roused me to keen alertness. A chill wind was blowing over my skin.
I drew in my arm hastily, and opened my eyes. That tall gray something had approached much nearer to me, and now I could distinguish with perfect clearness the figure of a man, but such a wavering, fluid form that one moment seemed on the point of dissolving into thin air, and the next moment gathering itself together again in clear cut outline.
For what seemed to me a long time I stared at the gray apparition. I felt a cold fear, a rigid horror creep over me, and but for the recollection of my husband's nearness, and the open door between us, I might have fainted from pure terror. I thought of calling to him, but something sinister in that wavering shadow made me desist. At times the form came quite close to the bed, but I could never see the face clearly; it was vague and undetermined in outline, in fact, not completely materialized. Not for a second did that wavering movement cease, that floating, shimmering motion 'twixt bed and window, of what I knew to be the ghost of a man.