The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Forgotten Threshold, by Arthur Middleton

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Title: The Forgotten Threshold

Author: Arthur Middleton

Release Date: August 8, 2004 [eBook #13138]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FORGOTTEN THRESHOLD***

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THE FORGOTTEN THRESHOLD

A Journal of Arthur Middleton

TO W.S.B.

FOR SUBSTANTIAL EMBODIMENT

PREFATORY NOTE

Before Arthur Middleton died he gave me this record among others in
the belief that it would help to tell me what he had always known in
the silences, yet could never in life transmute into the friendly
counters of speech. During the last years of his all too brief
experience of his friends, more than once he shyly sought to tell what
he knew, yet always silence claimed him, and nothing but the wonder of
his eyes revealed the dream that consumed his heart. Because beauty
claims these words in a deeper knowledge than we had before, I have
transcribed this fragment of them here, confident that in these white
intuitions of his youth there is a revelation of the Light behind
beauty beyond our poor knowledge and still poorer faith. I have
omitted only what was most sacred to the privacies of his heart and
our affection. He was of the old faith and would have wished had he
published these pages to have expressed his entire and passionate
loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church in faith and deed, and to have
disclaimed any word therein which conflicted with the intimacies of
its truth. I can do no more than to echo his wish, and mourn the
unhappy chance which took him from us on an April tide, though it
befell on the Easter that he loved and at that hour when the flaming
symbol of the Divine Sacrifice was setting in the west. So the passion
of the sun and tide which reflected his belief witnessed the
consummation of his great desire.--THE EDITOR.

THE FORGOTTEN THRESHOLD

THE JOURNAL

(N.B.--On the opening pages of the blank book in which this journal is
contained there is a short fragment which