heme."

My friend had written to some missionary society to send him to the South
Seas, when I offered him Renan's "Life of Christ" and a copy of "Esoteric
Buddhism." He refused both, but a few days later while reading for an
examination in Kildare Street Library, he asked in an idle moment for
"Esoteric Buddhism" and came out an esoteric Buddhist. He wrote to the
missionaries withdrawing his letter and offered himself to the
Theosophical Society as a _chela_. He was vexed now at my lack of zeal,
for I had stayed somewhere between the books, held there perhaps by my
father's scepticism. I said, and he thought it was a great joke though I
was serious, that even if I were certain in my own mind, I did not know "a
single person with a talent for conviction." For a time he made me ashamed
of my world and its lack of zeal, and I wondered if his world (his father
was a notorious Orange leader) where everything was a matter of belief was
not better than mine. He himself proposed the immediate conversion of the
other show boy, a clever little fellow, now a Dublin mathematician and
still under five feet. I found him a day later in much depression. I said,
"did he refuse to listen to you?" "Not at all," was the answer, "for I had
only been talking for a quarter of an hour when he said he believed."
Certainly those minds, parched by many examinations, were thirsty.

Sometimes a professor of Oriental Languages at Trinity College, a Persian,
came to our Society and talked of the magicians of the East. When he was a
little boy, he had seen a vision in a pool of ink, a multitude of spirits
singing in Arabic, "woe unto those that do not believe in us." And we
persuaded a Brahmin philosopher to come from London and stay for a few
days with the only one among us who had rooms of his own. It was my first
meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed
at once logical and boundless. Consciousness, he taught, does not merely
spread out its surface but has, in vision and in contemplation, another
motion and can change in height and in depth. A handsome young man with
the typical face of Christ, he chaffed me good-humouredly because he said
I came at breakfast and began some question that was interrupted by the
first caller, waited in silence till ten or eleven at night when the last
caller had gone, and finished my question.

XXVI

I thought a great deal about the system of education from which I had
suffered,