osition for which I was
too small. I realized that in that half hour under ether I had served
God more distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before,
or than I am capable of desiring to do. I was the means of his
achieving and revealing something, I know not what or to whom, and
that, to the exact extent of my capacity for suffering.

"While regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had gone so
deep, I had seen nothing of what the saints call the LOVE of God,
nothing but his relentlessness. And then I heard an answer, which I
could only just catch, saying, 'Knowledge and Love are One, and the
MEASURE is suffering'--I give the words as they came to me. With that I
came finally to (into what seemed a dream world compared with the
reality of what I was leaving), and I saw that what would be called the
'cause' of my experience was a slight operation under insufficient
ether, in a bed pushed up against a window, a common city window in a
common city street. If I had to formulate a few of the things I then
caught a glimpse of, they would run somewhat as follows:--

"The eternal necessity of suffering and its eternal vicariousness. The
veiled and incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings;--the
passivity of genius, how it is essentially instrumental and
defenseless, moved, not moving, it must do what it does;--the
impossibility of discovery without its price;--finally, the excess of
what the suffering 'seer' or genius pays over what his generation
gains. (He seems like one who sweats his life out to earn enough to
save a district from famine, and just as he staggers back, dying and
satisfied, bringing a lac of rupees to buy grain with, God lifts the
lac away, dropping ONE rupee, and says, 'That you may give them. That
you have earned for them. The rest is for ME.') I perceived also in a
way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over what we can
demonstrate.

"And so on!--these things may seem to you delusions, or truisms; but
for me they are dark truths, and the power to put them into even such
words as these has been given me by an ether dream."

With this we make connection with religious mysticism pure and simple.
Symonds's question takes us back to those examples which you will
remember my quoting in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen, of
sudden realization of the immediate presence of God. The phenomenon in
one shape or another is not uncommon.

"I know," writes