feeling
of perfect peace;--absolute rest from physical interference;--perfect
contentment;--the sense of Being-one-with-the-Reality, carrying with
it a knowledge that the Reality or Spiritual is nearer to us and has
much more to do with us than the Physical has, if we could only see
the truth and recognise its presence;--that there is no real
death;--no finiteness and yet no Infinity;--that the Great Spirit
cannot be localised or said to be anywhere, but that everywhere is
God;--that the whole of what we call Creation is an instantaneous
Thought of the Reality;--that it is only by the process of analysing
in Time and Space that we imagine there is such a thing as succession
of events;--that the only Reality is the _Spiritual_, the _Here_
embracing all Space and the _Now_ embracing all Time.

How few of us who are now drawing towards the end of our sojourn here,
have not, at certain times during our lives, experienced something
akin to what I have tried to put before you in the above! Does not a
particular scent, a beautiful country scene, a phrase in music, the
beauty or pathos in a picture, symbolic sculpture in a grand
cathedral, or even a chance word spoken in our hearing, every now and
then waken in our innermost consciousness an enchanting memory of some
wonderful happy moment of the past when the sun seemed to have been
shining more brightly, the birds singing more merrily, when everything
in nature seemed more alive, and our very beings seemed wrapped up in
an intense love of our surroundings? On those occasions we were not
far from seeing behind the veil, though we did not recognise it at the
time; but when we now look back, with experience gained by advancing
years, and consider those visions of the past, we cannot help seeing
that the physical film was to our eyes more transparent at those
times, and the very joy of their remembrance seems to be giving us a
prescience of that which we shall experience, when for each one of us
the physical film is pricked and passes away like a scroll.

VIEW THREE

MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM

"Who can doubt that the Mystics know more than the Theologians, and
that the Poets know more than the Scientists? for this inner
apprehension is surely the highest and truest kind of Knowledge." Such
were the words written to me lately by a clergyman of great learning
and of unimpeachable orthodoxy, whose mature knowledge of the Higher
Mysteries has been gained by a life-long stu