The instant one perceives the inner meaning of Equality, glimpsing the great Seamless Robe of humanity as one;—he realises that what is best for him is best for all others—what is best for the many is his own highest behest.... One must grasp this to know what Democracy means, to know what is behind the word, a meaning which those who use it most haven't dreamed of. You must grasp the spirit of the hive—that winged myriads of golden atoms never stray so far as to break the spirit-cord that binds them into one—that the one knows all, contains potentially all goodness and beauty and truth, that all action, art and thought, come from the spirit of the one—that the fruits of these go back. I love to tell it again and again. I saw it all afresh to-day.
The sun plays tricks with the earth at high noon. One feels superbly well—a kind of seething in the veins. It pulls him away from the great quest for the Father's House, in gusts of Mother Nature's magic. All the fragrance of fallow fields is in the hot light and blowing hay and deathless azure and high noon. Glorious swarms of bees were breaking out from the Spirit of the hive, all one in Spirit at the top—the Spirit brooding at all times over all the workings of the hive.... It was the same with the millions of men who walk the earth, one at the top—all one, coming and going in the Spirit, replenished and replenishing always, learning the fusions here in friends and lovers, each finding his one, and then the new quest together for the Great Companions.
Then it came to me that we are only sick and blind and lame and evil—in the sense of detachment. We must kill that out. Hate spoils everything. Hate binds us to the object. We mustn't despise another's coat. It may have been ours yesterday—may be ours to-morrow. We must kill out the sense of separateness from any creature, for we are destined to become one spirit with him and all others. Something like a cloud—all one, as a cloud is one.
Every morning on the grass—on millions of blades of grass—a globe of dew at the tip of each.... The Lord Sun arises. The dew warms a little and slips down the track of the blade into the root. There it breaks up into infinite fragments. The sun rising higher weaves his warm magic over the fields; invisibly, like prayers ascending, the drops of dew, all diffused into a thousand fragments each, thin as steam, and carrying the perfumes of roses and lilacs and honeysuckles and meadow lands and fallow lands and lake and ocean shores,—like prayers ascending, the dewdrops of yesterday return as one to the cloud. Broken into the farthest diffusion, but not an atom lost. All the richness of earth in essence returning to the Spirit....
The same with bee and dewdrop and man—the same with swarm and cloud and tribe—each fragment and division lifting to a greater, unto the Shining Source at last.... The point of it all is that man is spiritually woven to his brother and to the race; giving himself and his service to his brother and to the race he glorifies the texture and stature of his own soul.
Christmas, 1917.
FOOTNOTES
[1] H.A. Sturtzel.