e? The special point here is
that these most vivid and intense experiences are largely, if not
entirely, encountered unconsciously. They suddenly--come. One asks for
them--and they do not come? Now how are we to pluck out the heart of the
mystery?

The moment one realizes himself as a spiritual being, belonging by right
to the spiritual world; one whose true interests are in and of that
realm, and to whom communion with the Divine is the very breath of
existence, the one elixir of life, that moment he asserts himself
aright. From that hour his life becomes a significant factor in true
progress. Prayer may be a formal and ceremonial act, and mean nothing:
it may be the absolute surrender of one's soul to the Divine, when it
enters behind the veil into the very glory of God. This spiritual truth
is closely linked with certain scientific facts. The scientists have
theories of inner ether by means of which psychic power is conveyed and
which translate it into action, as the wire translates the electric
current to express a message. A scientist asserts a new theory that
there are no varying states of ether, but that all space is filled with
matter in various states of vibration; and that what we had heretofore
called air and ether is simply all one substance in degrees of lower and
higher range. It is conceivable that this latest idea may approximate to
the truth more than any previous theory. No one has yet discovered those
forces of nature by means of which sense relates itself to spirit. There
is certainly some great law, still unrecognized and unformulated, which
acts, and which is acted upon by human beings, irrespective of any
physical means; but why these laws sometimes do and sometimes do not
produce given results, no one can tell. There are other existing laws in
the physical world that transcend scientific scrutiny. The marvellous
results of chemical combinations, the miracle nature of electricity and
all its phenomena, fade into absolute nothingness beside the higher
marvels of the action of spirit. The crude and merely approximate truth
must be that in each human being is a part of the divine being; that
this divine element may be nurtured and strengthened by living in its
native atmosphere of spiritual life,--in the atmosphere of peace, joy,
and love; and that this potency of God and of man, so far as he relates
himself to God, can act upon that substance that fills all space; that
this substance, whether it be