eresting anaesthetic revelation communicated to me in
manuscript by a friend in England. The subject, a gifted woman, was
taking ether for a surgical operation.

"I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I remembered
having heard it said that people 'learn through suffering,' and in view
of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of this saying struck me so much
that I said, aloud, 'to suffer IS to learn.'

"With that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately
preceded my real coming to. It only lasted a few seconds, and was most
vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words.

"A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on
a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway. The
lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close
to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight line,
and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious
existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the
foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my
pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might to do
was to CHANGE HIS COURSE, to BEND the line of lightning to which he was
tied, in the direction in which he wanted to go. I felt my flexibility
and helplessness, and knew that he would succeed. He bended me, turning
his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been
hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I SAW.
I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that
no one could remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse
angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or
acute angle, I should have both suffered and 'seen' still more, and
should probably have died.

"He went on and I came to. In that moment the whole of my life passed
before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress, and I
UNDERSTOOD them. THIS was what it had all meant, THIS was the piece of
work it had all been contributing to do. I did not see God's purpose,
I only saw his intentness and his entire relentlessness towards his
means. He thought no more of me than a man thinks of hurting a cork
when he is opening wine, or hurting a cartridge when he is firing. And
yet, on waking, my first feeling was, and it came with tears, 'Domine
non sum digna,' for I had been lifted into a p